


Into the Newtverse

by buckgaybarnes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Complete, Hijinks & Shenanigans, M/M, Multiverse, Mutual Pining, POV Multiple, Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Fix-It, Time Travel, Universe Travel, and also technically, newt's rampant self-esteem issues, newts on newts on newts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-11-08 14:16:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20836853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckgaybarnes/pseuds/buckgaybarnes
Summary: Strange activity in the Breach leads to a sudden influx of Newts in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Newt can handle this. Probably.(Fic finished and will be posted chapter-by-chapter over the next couple days!)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feriowind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feriowind/gifts).

> holy cow this one has taken me SO LONG to write!!
> 
> written at the request of ferio for art-fic swap, who wanted a crossover with all their various AU newts. newts featured: astronewt, kaiju 'mother' newt, and siren newt (from siren newt/vamp hermann au), plus one mystery bonus newt 👀 which is extremely obvious to guess LOL

It’s not often Newt and Hermann get visitors to the lab. The opposite of often, in fact—the rest of the Shatterdome usually go out of their way to _avoid _the lab. It’s in intern training to stay out of the basement unless absolutely necessary. Newt can’t really blame anyone. He and Hermann have a tendency to, you know, argue a lot, and shout, and hurl things across the room at each other, and maybe once or twice you throw a kaiju spleen at a guy and it has a bad chemical reaction with the chalkboard it hits and you get knocked out for a few hours. All in the name of scientific discovery.

They especially don’t get visitors at three in the morning. _Newt and Hermann _aren’t even supposed to be in the lab at three in the morning. Nevertheless, there’s someone knocking loudly, insistently, on the door, loud enough to wake Hermann from his nap on the couch, loud enough for Newt to hear it through the music blaring from his earbuds.

“Newton?” Hermann mumbles, squinting up blearily at him through his crooked glasses.

“I got it,” Newt sighs, peeling off his work gloves and flicking them into the trash. “Go back to sleep.” It better be a pretty fucking big emergency. He already got interrupted from his work earlier when they had a false Breach alarm, bells and lights going off and everything, and he and Hermann (still in blue-striped pajamas) had to haul ass down to LOCCENT only to be told there wasn’t a single fucking kaiju.

It’s a LOCCENT tech, young (intern, maybe), out of breath, and red-knuckled by the time Newt swings the door open with a yawn. Hermann’s fallen back asleep. “Yeah?” Newt says.

“Dr. Geiszler?” the tech says.

Newt rubs his eyes beneath his glasses. “What’s the buzz?” he says. “It’s, like, super late. You know that, right?” If Newt actually slept, this would’ve been a pretty rude wake-up call, actually. 

“We need you in LOCCENT,” she says. “_Now_.”

“I thought you guys didn’t detect anything in the Breach?” Newt says as he hurries after the tech. “I thought it was just a _blip_. You told us it was a blip.” They’d said it in those very words, in fact: Tendo clapped them on the shoulders, said _go back to sleep, fellas, only a blip_, and Hermann griped for a bit and insisted on examining the holodisplay anyway before Newt was able to drag him out. 

“It _was _a blip,” she says. “It opened for a _second_. We didn’t think—” Her voice falters. “No kaiju got through.”

“But something did?”

She stares at him, silent, chewing at her bottom lip.

Newt slows to a halt. “Look,” he says, “if it’s not a kaiju, I don’t know how much help I’m gonna be. Hermann’s the one you want for—”

“No,” she says quickly. “We need you. _Please _just follow me, Dr. Geiszler.”

Newt obliges, begrudgingly. They turn the corner; the tech shoves open the LOCCENT door.

There’s another Newton Geiszler standing inside.

The shock doesn’t wear off quickly, nor does it become any less weird, nor is Newt able to remotely wrap his head around it. Newt stands and stares at his double, and his double stands and stares back. He has Newt’s hair. Newt’s nose. Newt’s slight double chin. He’s better dressed than Newt by a long shot—no glasses, white button-up and tie swapped out for a shirt that looks like black silk and a vest that looks more expensive than half of Newt’s lab equipment combined, skinny jeans for tight slacks—and a little older, but those rolled-up sleeves reveal the same tattoos as Newt’s, the same assortment of leather bracelets, the same scar on his right wrist from a kaiju blood chemical burn. He’s _Newt_.

“Holy shit,” both Newts say at the same time.

Then Newt makes a beeline for the door.

“Dr. Geiszler!” The same tech from before snags Newt by the back of his shirt. She’s fast. Newt will give her that.

“I’ve seen _Us_!” Newt shouts, struggling futilely. “I know what kind of bullshit this is!”

“I’m not going to kill you, dumbass,” the other Newt says.

Newt goes limp. He squints suspiciously over his shoulder. “Then why are you _here_?”

“Buddy,” Newt’s double says, “I have no fucking clue.”

* * *

The graveyard shift LOCCENT crew—which consists of three techs, the single intern, and a currently extremely amused Tendo Choi—explain to Newt they, frankly, have no fucking clue how Other Newt got there either (not their exact words this time), but they have a pretty good idea of what was involved. “Around twenty minutes ago,” Tendo says, “there was another Blip in the Breach.”

“We’re dead-set on calling it a Blip, then?” Newt says.

Tendo ignores him. “Fraction of a second,” he continues. “Only this time, it was right in LOCCENT. And something _did _come through.”

“Hi,” Other Newt says, and waves.

There was a flash of blue light, like lightning, apparently, right over their heads (Tendo explains), and then a bonafide Newton Geiszler tumbled out of thin air. Naturally, they’d all been a little shaken, and—after some light interrogation (yes, he was Dr. Newton Geiszler, yes, he could recite his Shatterdome ID number, yes, you’re holding up six fingers, now can someone please tell me where the fuck I am?) and a debate as to whether or not to handcuff him or tie him to a chair (they unanimously decided upon neither, on the grounds that a majority of them were twice Newt’s size and could tackle him or lift him up above their heads without issue should the need arise), Newt was sent for.

“He’s just—_you_, Newt,” Tendo finishes. “No doubt about it.”

Newt had to take a seat, at one point, and at another point, someone handed him a cup of coffee (he must’ve looked like he was about to faint, which he thinks would’ve been understandable), and now—slightly dazed—he stands up to face himself. His other self. He hears a sharp intake of breath across the room, which he thinks is a bit overdramatic—he’s not going to _rush at _the guy, or anything. “He’s me,” he says.

“I mean, technically,” Other Newt says, “I’m you from 2035.”

Here are the morning’s events as they played out from the Newton Geiszler of 2035’s perspective, which he graciously divulges to them all: one minute, he’s enjoying a kaiju-free retirement in his cozy little apartment in Shanghai, one hand holding onto a glass of wine, the other holding onto Hermann Gottlieb, and the next, he’s landing on his ass in the Hong Kong Shatterdome of ten years ago in a burst of blue and being gawked at by _himself._ “I just hope Hermann isn’t worried about me,” he sighs.

Newt, still a bit dazed, and still processing most of 2035 Newt’s story, says “Why would Hermann be worried about you?”

2035 Newt stares at him in surprise. “Because we’re married?”

“Oh,” Newt squeaks. Tendo wolf-whistles. “Obviously.”

Medical is the obvious next course of action, and it’s a credit to the amount of weird shit Newt gets himself into that the sole doctor on duty doesn’t bat an eye when Tendo rolls up with twice as many of him as usual. “Cloning accident?” she says.

“Breach, actually,” Tendo says.

The doctor _tsks _and motions them back behind a curtain. A quick blood and fingerprinting test confirms this is, in fact, a moderately older Newton Geiszler—though Newt doesn’t think any of them really doubted it—and a small physical examination further confirms that nothing vital was damaged when he was quote-unquote _zapped _over here.

“He said I marry Hermann,” Newt hisses under his breath to Tendo as 2035 Newt changes out of a paper medical robe and back into his fancy fucking silk and vest. Newt isn’t checking himself out or anything, because that would be weird, but if he hypothetically catches a glimpse of his half-nude future(?) bod he would be shocked by how _fit _he gets. Dude looks like he drinks five protein shakes a day. He probably does crossfit. “I _marry Hermann_.”

“Gotta say, pal,” Tendo says, “if that's what you're stuck on here, I’m questioning your priorities.”

Before Newt can point out the fact that Hermann hates him and would never marry him in a million years, or talk about how expensive that shirt looks, or even debate the logistics of where, exactly, this Newt is from—the future? An alternate reality that moves just slightly faster? The future _of _an alternate reality?—Tendo’s commlink begins beeping furiously. “Hang on,” he says, and clicks it on. He winces immediately; whoever is on the other end is shouting so loudly that Newt can catch snippets of it.

He hears _Blip_, and he hears _another one_. 

Well-dressed and rich Newt Geiszler was one thing, but this—a _merman _with Newt’s face, Newt’s tattoos, a wild mane of brown hair, a necklace of broken glass and jagged shell fragments, flopping wetly around LOCCENT and snarling at anyone who comes near, eyes wide with terror—is, frankly, almost too much for him to handle. It shouldn’t be scientifically possible, for one. Mermaids don’t exist. They just—don’t. They’re ranked alongside dragons in _list of cool shit Newt wishes was real. _“He came in just like the last one,” the now extremely frazzled intern tells Newt. “There was another Blip, and he fell out of the sky.” She adds weakly, “He _bit _Miguel.”

Newt catches sight of a tech wrapping his arm in gauze in the corner. He also catches sight of the terrifying set of teeth the merman possesses, more like white razorblades (the tips tinged red, courtesy of poor Miguel) than anything else, and his _nasty _set of claws. Not very Little Mermaid, then. If Prince Eric tried to chat this guy up he’d probably lose an arm.

Newt steels himself and takes a step towards the merman. “Hey, dude,” he says. Mer-Newt flops around to face him, growling. Newt lets out a little squeak. “Uh. Newt?”

The hazel eyes identical to Newt’s sweep over him, terror fading into something more like surprise, and the lips close and hide the teeth. He stops flopping around. “Who are_you_?” he says.

Mer-Newt—or technically, as Newt learns, since the guy seems a bit more amenable to chatting to someone with his face, _Siren _Newt—gives a story that’s strikingly similar to 2035 Newt’s, in that he has no fucking idea what happened to him either. He was visiting his friend Hermann, he claims, in his castle, and they’d been talking, when out of nowhere he was landing _here _and some people were trying to _touch _him and he thought for sure they were poachers coming to skin him alive. (Sidenote: aside from the strangely butterfly-inducing factor that Newt-and-Hermann seem to be a transuniversal constant, Hermann is apparently a vampire in this Newt’s reality. With a castle. How’d Newt get stuck with regular bitchy non-vampire Hermann when Hermanns like that are out there?) He swishes his tail as he speaks, long and colorful, and it’s strangely mesmerizing. As is his voice. Siren, after all. Newt wonders how many sailors this scary bastard has lured to their doom.

Siren Newt doesn’t hiss at Newt this time when he squats next to him, which is an improvement. “This is going to sound nuts,” Newt says, “but I’m you from an alternate dimension. This alternate dimension.” He points over his shoulder at 2035 Newt. “So is he. We have no idea—”

The Breach monitoring system begins beeping. There’s another shock of blue over their heads.

“For God’s sake,” a tech says.

The Newt that falls through this time (with a very Newt-like yelp) really _could _be Newt’s clone, down to the bags under his eyes to the splatters of formaldehyde on his shirt, but he doesn’t have time to do anything more than stagger back against a computer, stare at them all in wild wide-eyed confusion, and say “What the hell?” before there’s more beeping, more lightning, and _another _Newt is flailing on the ground in front of them.

This Newt stirs a bit more of a reaction. Probably because of what he’s wearing—a thigh-high booty-shorts crop-top combination that wouldn’t be out of place in a porno and that has Newt’s ears burning in mortification despite it all. Three of the techs hurry forward to help him up, including the injured Miguel. 

“_Wow_,” that Newt laughs. He sways on his feet, and falls back against Miguel, who catches him easily. “Where are my—?” Another tech (Newt thinks his name is Leo) scrambles to pick up a pair of thick-rimmed goggle-like glasses and hand them to that Newt. He smiles beatifically and slips them on, batting his eyelashes more than strictly necessary. “Thank you.”

“Hello?” the Newt that fell through right before him shrieks. “Where the fuck am I?”

“Are you alright, Dr. Geiszler?” Miguel says, uninjured hand placed at Newt’s—well, the other Newt’s, the one in thigh-highs—waist, _chivalrously _avoiding touching any bare skin. And there is a whole lot of bare skin to touch.

“You know my name!” that Newt says delightedly.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Leo says, scooting up against his other side and flashing Miguel a quick scowl.

Batted eyelashes in Leo’s direction. It’s Miguel’s turn to scowl. “Really, I’m okay,” That Newt says. “Thank you, guys.” He pats Miguel’s gauze-wrapped arm and wriggles from their grasps. (A strange expression crosses Miguel’s face—immediately, the crimson blooming through his bandages seems to slow to a halt.)

Then the new Newt notices Newt. Newt, plural. All of them. His immediate predecessor, who’s scooped up a desk lamp and a paperweight from someone’s desk and is wielding both like weapons and slowly backing into a corner. Siren Newt, curled up in a ball on the floor, claws and fangs bared. 2035 Newt, who’s strangely blank-faced about it all. Newt himself, as in, this world’s Newt, _him_-Newt, Newt who’s having the weirdest day of his entire life and it’s not even breakfast.

The latest Newt doesn’t even have the decency to act surprised. “Oh,” he says, one hand on his jauntily cocked-out hip. “Hi, everyone.”

* * *

The intern is sent to retrieve a tub of water and an industrial-sized dolly for the siren Newt, who was beginning to look uncomfortably dehydrated, and—at a loss for where else to go, and unanimously deciding another trip to medical isn’t totally necessary—they all trudge down to the laboratory together under Newt’s watchful eye, 2035 Newt leading the way. “Hermann is going to _freak _when he finds out about this,” Newt sighs.

“Oh, he’s definitely going to have a stroke,” another Newt agrees. It’s the one that came in right after Siren Newt, the one who, at closer inspection, looks a fair bit older than Newt—grey at his temples, lines at the corners of his eyes—but almost identical apart from that. Probably another future Newt. Newt wonders how drastically different this guy’s future is from Newt’s own projected timeline to warrant being ripped across dimensions, but not quite different enough to learn how to finally tie a fucking tie or use less product in his hair.

“Hey, Newt,” Newt says, fully intending to ask.

“Yes?” Newt, Newt, Newt, and Newt say.

“Oh,” Newt says. “Right.”

“You know,” older, grey-templed Newt says, “we should come up with code names. At least until—” He wiggles his hand between the five of them. “We figure this shit out. It’ll make it a _lot _easier.”

“Oh,” Newt repeats. “Yeah, good idea. I’ll be Newt—”

“Back it up,” older Newt says, “why do _you _get to be Newt?”

“Because this is _my _world,” Newt says. “So shut up.” He points to Siren Newt. “You’re Siren Newt—”

Siren Newt bares his fangs at Newt. Jesus, did he sharpen them when Newt’s back was turned or something? They look worse than before. “Why am I stuck with a stupid name like that?”

Newt blinks. “I mean. It’s kind of self-explanatory.”

“Then why aren’t you _Human _Newt?”

“That’s actually a good question,” older Newt says. “It’s not really fair to—”

“Holy shit, you guys,” Newt says. “No wonder Hermann wants to kill me half the time.” He points to Siren Newt, whose fangs seem to grow incrementally longer again. “You’re Siren Newt,” older Newt, “you’re _Bossy _Newt—" skimpy clothing Newt, who’s been beaming away and seemingly enjoying the task of pushing Siren Newt’s tub, “You’re...I don’t even know what to do with you, man. What’s your deal?”

“I explore planets!” scantily-clothed Newt exclaims happily. “I’ve never been to Earth before. I like it.”

There’s a merman Newt shacking up with his very own vampire Hermann and a Newt from fucking outer space and Newt’s neither of them. It doesn’t really seem fair. “What do you want to be called?” Newt says.

“Sexy Newt,” Bossy Newt offers.

No one has any issue with this, especially not Sexy Newt, who laughs and flutters his eyelashes demurely. “Sexy Newt it is,” Newt declares. “What about you?”

They all turn to face 2035 Newt, who has been silent this whole time. He gives them a sharp grin. “Call me Dr. Geiszler.”

It’s not until their odd little parade makes it to the lab door that Newt remembers that Hermann is still asleep on the couch inside. It’s not worth the risk of waking him up—Newt is the loudest person on Earth and now there are _five _of them—but he does want his hand-held voice recorder. He can’t just be expected to not take notes on all this. “Change of plans,” he tells the Newts. “I’m running in. Five minutes. That’s all.” He points to Dr. Geiszler. “You’re in charge.”

He slips and snags his recorder from where it rests atop some blue-splattered lab notes, as quiet as he can manage, but before he can slip back out the couch springs are creaking and Hermann is groaning awake. _Shit_. Of course. “Newton,” Hermann says, fumbling for his glasses, which have fallen to the floor, “what on earth are you doing up?”

“Uh.” Newt waves his recorder. “Research.” 

Hermann squints blearily at him. “Why?”

“Because,” Newt says. “There’s—” Hermann reaches for his cane and starts to stand; panic sparks in Newt’s chest. “No, no, wait, don’t—”

Hermann sighs and rubs his eyes, swaying a little. “I only want to go to bed,” he says. “I don’t care what nonsense you’re—”

“It’s such a long way,” Newt says, anxiously, jumping in front of him and holding out his hands. “Do you really want to walk _all _the way to your room and have to come back for work in—” He checks the clock on the wall. Jeez, he’s been up a while. “—Two hours?”

Never liking Newt to second-guess _anything _he does, and especially not something as mundane as going to bed, Hermann swells with anger. For a moment, Newt’s sure he’s going to shout and push him aside and march out. But he just sags a bit. “Two hours?” he echoes. “Oh, I suppose not.”

“Let’s get you on that couch, dude,” Newt says, steering him around and patting his back. Hermann scowls over his shoulder. “Okay, here we go—”

“I don’t need to be bloody coddled,” Hermann says, and swats him away, but he does let Newt work his blazer off his shoulders, pull off his glasses, and spread a blanket out over top him once lays back down. His eyelids droop shut fast. “Don’t let me oversleep,” he mumbles. “I’ve really got. Ah. Quite a bit of work.”

Newt’s already out the door.

* * *

**NEWT INTERVIEWS: TAKE ONE**

**(TRANSCRIPT)**

NEWT: Okay, we’re good to go. Name and origin—speak right into the recorder.

SEXY NEWT: Newt Geiszler. Uh. Space.

NEWT: Can you be a little more...specific?

SEXY NEWT: Nope!

NEWT: [sighs]

NEWT: This is really helpful. Okay. How old are you?

SEXY NEWT: Not sure. I don’t really bother keeping track of that kind of stuff, you know? It’s not that important to me. But I feel like I must be old. I’ve been travelling for a_while_.

NEWT: What do you mean by ‘travelling’?”

SEXY NEWT: I travel.

NEWT: Where?

SEXY NEWT: Around.

**(TRANSCRIPT ENDS)**

* * *

Newt tosses down his recorder. “_Come on_, dude,” he says, but instantly regrets it, because Sexy Newt shrinks back and looks at him like a kicked toddler. Damn it. He wonders if that pout would work on Hermann if he tried it out. “Okay, okay,” he says. He flips to a new page in his notebook and readies his pencil. “I’m sorry for snapping. Can you just—give me _some _details? Do you have a magic phonebox or something?”

“I explore new planets,” Sexy Newt says, brightening up a little, “and go on adventures, and collect stuff—well, people _give _me stuff. And I have a lot of sex.”

Newt’s pencil tip snaps. “You _what_?”

“I have a lot of sex,” Sexy Newt repeats, cheerful as before.

“Right,” Newt wheezes. “That’s what I thought you said.”

* * *

Newt’s interview with Siren Newt does not go much better; he spends the first five minutes hissing and swiping at Newt with his claws, and by the time Newt finally gets bare minimum info out of him—that his name is Newt, nothing else, and he lives in the waters of a dangerous, rocky coast, and also he might eat people—he’s gotten bored and decides to start also trying to eat the contents of Newt’s jewelry box. It takes Bossy Newt stepping in and scolding to get him to stop, which—Newt decides—quickly earns him the moniker of _Mother Newt _over Bossy Newt.

At that point, tired, and more than a little frustrated, Newt just considers giving up, but he’s too interested in what Mother Newt and Dr. Geiszler have to say about their bizarro future world. Turns out, it’s a lot.

“I’m forty-five,” Mother Newt says into the recorder. “In my world, we defeated the kaiju, uh, ten years ago. I continued my research after the war and developed a method of cloning kaiju—”

“Cloning kaiju?” Newt and Dr. Geiszler echo in unison.

Mother Newt flashes them a small smile, just a hint of pride in it. “I guess it’s not _really _cloning,” he says. “More just—developing them. I’ve developed and raised, uh, half a dozen from embryos at this point. They’re amazing.”

“You _raised _them?” Newt squeaks. Maybe the nickname was more apt than he realized.

“From babies,” Mother Newt says. “Every single one. It wasn’t easy. Here—”

He fishes his wallet out of his pocket and flips it open: a folding sleeve of about fifteen photos falls out. Each photo features at least one kaiju, all of varying size and apparent genetic makeup and levels of _completely fucking adorable_. In one, a teary-eyed Mother Newt is holding a tiny lizard-like kaiju bundled up in a blanket. “My kids,” he declares. He slips the wallet back into his pocket while Newt continues to gape. “Anyway, the PPDC found out eventually, and they actually hired me to keep doing it, to make a sort of—Earth defense system, in case the Breach ever opens again.”

Newt has a million questions he wants to ask—about the cloning process, about _raising kaiju_, about how they closed the Breach in the first place—but he’s also, frankly, very surprised that the PPDC is not only funding this, but that Newt didn’t drop them the moment the war ended in the first place. He always had visions of stepping back into his old spot at MIT if he survived, or starting a band, or maybe publishing what little of his research on kaiju wasn’t highly classified and sharing a cozy apartment—_completely_ platonically—with Hermann. “You’re still with the PPDC?”

“I didn’t really have a choice,” Mother Newt says, a bit sheepishly. “It wasn’t, you know, _totally _legal to develop kaiju embryos, so it was pretty much either take the job or get in a lot of trouble.” That makes more sense. “Besides, I still get to work with Hermann. Win-win.”

Dr. Geiszler jumps in before Newt can follow up with anything else. “This is incredible,” he breathes. “Half a dozen. You _raised _them. How did you force them to obey you?”

Mother Newt’s smile flickers into a frown. “I didn’t force them to do anything.”

“You had to have,” Dr. Geiszler says. “How else—”

“They _trust _me,” Mother Newt says. He looks at Dr. Geiszler strangely. “That’s how. Drifting made me—” His eyes flick over to Newt, who has been hanging onto their every word with barely-concealed fascination over even the smallest glimpse at his future. “—Well.”

“Drifting made you _what_?” Dr. Geiszler says.

Mother Newt reaches out and switches off Newt’s recorder; Newt jerks back. “Hey!”

“I’m done,” Mother Newt declares. “Can I talk to you, Newt?”

“I still gotta interview Dr. Geiszler, dude,” Newt sighs. “Can you wait—?”

“No,” Mother Newt says, and drags Newt out by his shirt.

* * *

He doesn’t stop dragging him along until they reach the end of the hallway, where he pushes Newt up against the wall. “I don’t trust him,” he hisses.

Newt blinks at him. “I’m sorry,” he says, “uh, what are we talking about?”

“I don’t trust Dr. Geiszler,” Mother Newt continues. “There’s something—” He makes a face. “—off about him.”

“He’s fine,” Newt says. “He’s _us_. He was just getting excited.” He wriggles out of Mother Newt’s grasp. “To tell you the truth, I’m fucking excited about all this too. You _raised _them. What did you mean by drifting? Is that how we save the world? Do you drift with someone?”

Mother Newt works his lower lip between his teeth. He sighs. “I don’t think I should tell you about your future, Newt,” he finally says. “Even your hypothetical future. I think it’s important that your choices are entirely your own, and entirely uninfluenced by what I or Dr. Geiszler have experienced.” The hand he places on Newt’s shoulder is gentle this time. Like an older brother offering advice. (Newt can’t help but feel he's being condescended to.) “I just need you to take my word for it that you need to be very, very careful around him.”

Newt forces a laugh. “Careful? What’s he going to do?”

Before Mother Newt can answer, they’re interrupted by a familiar furious clacking and an equally furious “_Newton_.”

“Shit,” both Newts hiss.

Newt pops his head around Mother Newt. “Hey, Hermann.”

Hermann is wildly disheveled, from his hair to his unbuttoned pajama shirt, and there are red lines on his cheek identical those on the couch cushions. He’s clearly just woken up. “It is nine o’clock in the morning,” he declares. “I’ve overslept by an hour. You said you’d _wake _me.” He narrows his eyes at Mother Newt’s back. “Who is this?”

Mother Newt turns sheepishly, and Hermann startles backwards. “This is my cousin!” Newt shouts. “Also—also a Dr. Geiszler. He’s visiting. I was giving him a tour.”

“Your cousin,” Hermann echoes, faintly. He gives Mother Newt a once-over, undoubtedly taking in the numerous differences between them—the grey hairs, the scruffier beard, the thicker glasses, the more pronounced softness of his abdomen. His posture relaxes. “Of course. Your cousin. You have, ah, quite the resemblance. I thought—” He taps his finger on the head of his cane. “Nevermind.”

“You must be Dr. Gottlieb,” Mother Newt says. “Newt talks about you a lot.” He gives Hermann a once-over of his own, longer than what Newt thinks is _strictly _appropriate; younger model Hermann than what he’s used to, Newt supposes. Refamiliarizing himself. It doesn’t excuse the blatantly flirtatious smile he gives Hermann a second later. “It’s a _pleasure _to meet you.”

To Newt’s horror, Hermann’s cheeks color almost imperceptibly. “You—you as well,” he says. “Er. Newton. I will be—in the laboratory.”

“Be there soon,” Newt says.

Newt rounds on Mother Newt the second Hermann’s out of sight. “What the hell, man?”

Mother Newt is equally pink in the face. “What?” he says.

Newt smacks his arm. “Stop flirting with _my Hermann_. You have your own!”

“I wasn’t flirting,” Mother Newt protests weakly, and Newt smacks his other arm. “Okay, _fine _, Hermann’s just—sexy when he’s angry, you know? And I forgot how young he used to be. I got distracted.” He ducks his head in a goofy smile. “I miss his stupid haircut. Mine grew it out ages ago.”

“Unbelievable,” Newt huffs.

* * *

Newt leaves Siren Newt and Sexy Newt under the care of Mother Newt, who seems to be the only one who can operate a modicum of control over Siren Newt, and takes Dr. Geiszler up to the isolated Shatterdome roof for his interview. The incident in the hallway has left him more wary of Mother Newt than of Dr. Geiszler, and he’s itching for some privacy to interrogate Dr. Geiszler—who seems more than willing to spill everything to Newt—as he pleases. Newt can’t see the point in Mother Newt being coy about the future, not when the entire fucking world could be on the line. (He’s not sure how his timeline could’ve diverged so much as to make him a total _dick_.)

“Newt Interviews Take Four,” Newt says. “Name and—”

“I know the drill,” Dr. Geiszler cuts in smoothly. He leans in and speaks directly to the recorder. “Dr. Newton Geiszler, age forty-five, Earth, 2035. In my universe, we also closed the Breach ten years ago. I’m currently still employed by the PPDC in kaiju research, where I work alongside my husband, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb.”

Husband. Newt’s heart twinges pathetically. “You—you still work in k-sci?” he stammers.

“Nothing as _exciting _as cloning,” Dr. Geiszler laughs, just as smoothly. “Just because the kaiju are gone doesn’t mean the work is over. It’s important to be prepared in case they ever come back. Of course—we have twice as much funding now. Twice as much notoriety.”

It’s Newt’s turn to lean forward. “You do?”

“We—” Dr. Geiszler begins, and corrects himself, “that is, you and I, of course—did help _save the world_.”

Funding and notoriety; that would explain the expensive clothing and sunglasses. Future him must be _loaded_. Newt has never really cared too much about getting rich, but he does like the idea of people treating him seriously for once—of not being immediately written off as some nutty alien-obsessed Fox Mulder type the second he opens his mouth. He also likes the idea of _Hermann _treating him seriously. Seriously enough to give Newt the time of day beyond petty jabs at his research and an anger-fueled one night stand he refused to acknowledge the following morning. “And Hermann,” Newt says, “when do he and I—?”

“Oh, after the war,” Dr. Geiszler says. “You—_we _impress him.”

“How? Newt says, eagerly.

Another sharp smile. Dr. Geiszler reaches out, as Mother Newt has before, and switches off the recorder “Have you considered drifting with a kaiju yet, Newt?”

Newt has, in fact, considered drifting with a kaiju. He’s considered it extensively. In the past, he thought if he managed to get his hands on an intact piece of kaiju brain—the_tiniest _piece, a minuscule fraction of the size of the whole thing, even—and cannibalizes some defunct drift tech into a working pons interface, he could, hypothetically—_hypothetically_—drift with a kaiju. Just enough to learn more about them. (Entrails can only tell him so much.) It’s only a theory, of course, and one he’s aware is bonkers at that and will almost certainly never be approved by Pentecost, even though the PPDC finally _have _granted his completely innocuous request for a brain. He hasn’t even told Hermann about it. 

He tells Dr. Geiszler as much now, whose smile remains as sharp as ever. “It works,” he says. “You're right.”

“Are you shitting me?” Newt says.

“I know you have the brain in storage already, because I did, when I was you,” Dr. Geiszler says. “Listen—drift with it, and don’t tell _anyone _what you’re planning. Not the other guys—not the little kaiju-breeder. _Especially _not Hermann. He won’t understand, Newt—he’ll try to stop you, and the whole thing will be ruined.”

He places a hand on Newt’s shoulder—the same way that Mother Newt had—and squeezes once. Mentor to mentee. Newt covers it with his own, frowning. “I don’t understand,” he says, because he doesn’t. “What will be ruined? Can’t you just tell me what—?”

“No,” Dr. Geiszler says—_snaps_, really, and Newt jumps Dr. Geiszler squeezes his shoulder again, a little harder, eyes dark and hardened, and for a moment, a wild, ridiculous moment (_he’s us_, Newt said earlier) Newt feels a chill of fear down his spine. It passes as quickly as it came: Dr. Geiszler’s eyes are the same hazel as ever, and his grip on Newt goes lax. “You need to drift and learn it for yourself,” he says. “That’s all.”

Newt swallows down a sigh. Same spiel Mother Newt gave him, but at least Dr. Geiszler is indulging him a little_ . _“You’re sure I shouldn’t tell Hermann?” Newt says. “Because he’ll, what—stop me?”

“You know how Hermann _gets_,” Dr. Geiszler says, and, with a moderate level of fondness, “He’s such a bitch about everything.”

He is, really. He doesn’t seem to think Newt’s had a good idea in his entire life. He might shoot this one down out of spite. And if Dr. Geiszler is proof of anything, it’s not like it goes _wrong_—it very, very well, actually. Enough that Hermann is apparently so impressed he falls head over heels for him. “I guess,” Newt admits. “Okay.”

“Trust me,” Dr. Geiszler says, “it’s the right thing to do.”

* * *

Newt gets back to his bunk to discover that Siren Newt has torn through half his belongings. And Newt does mean _torn through_—a handful of his t-shirts and boxers are ripped to shreds, a few pulpy paperbacks have been mangled, and one of his pillows lies in great white feathery puffs across the floor. Siren Newt (wearing one of Newt’s beaded necklaces left over from New Year’s Eve) thrashes around in the carnage while Mother Newt runs around, frantically, throwing things back into drawers and the overflowing trashcan. “I’m sorry!” he shouts at Newt, wringing his hands around a pair of skinny jeans. “I don’t know what happened. I looked away for a second—!”

Newt falls to his knees and picks up a Pokemon t-shirt. It’s ripped down the middle. “This was vintage,” he moans.

“I want to go _home_,” Siren Newt shouts; his tail smacks against the dresser, and three of Newt’s kaiju figurines and an old framed photograph of him and Hermann at a Halloween party go flying. Mother Newt goes diving for the photograph, but not fast enough. It hits and ground and shatters. Newt scrambles to pick that up, too—he loves that picture.

“Hey,” Dr. Geiszler suddenly pipes up, barely audible over the chaos. “Where’d the other Newt go?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sexy Newt goes exploring. Hermann babysits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND ROUND TWO!!! depending on how i feel about the remaining bit, i might just do one more chapter instead of dividing it up into two. im glad everyone's enjoying this so far!

“Dr. Geiszler’s log,” Newt says. “Year, 2025, location, Earth, universe—” He clucks his tongue. “—unclear. I was examining flora a galaxy over when I suddenly found myself landing _ here_, no ship or anything, and—well, it’s weird.”

Newt’s dealt with all sorts of stuff before, from sentient plants, to immortal monsters, to aliens that claim to be gods, even clones _ before _ these_. _ Clones aren’t a new concept to Newt. Clones of Newt aren’t, either—he passed a fun evening with a few years ago, fought a few more to the death a year or so later. Average day at work. He doesn’t like to call things _ weird _for that reason, because nothing, really, is weird to Newt. Clones that aren’t clones, but, in fact, Newts that are just very, very, different, on a planet he’s never seen before, a planet Newt’s on in the first place because of a rift in reality that sucked him in—that’s weird. Newt feels entirely comfortable describing it as such. Scientific Classification: Fucked Up, Man. 

Anyway, he totally ran off. New, entirely unexplored (by Newt, anyway) planet, Newt’s not just gonna sit around in this universe’s Newt’s boring bedroom and twiddle his thumbs.

This Newt called this place a Shatterdome, and explained that it’s some sort of high-tech top-secret research facility dedicated to fighting giant aliens that crawled out of the same rift Newt did. He didn’t give much information beyond that. It looks like any other research facility Newt’s been in, though he does question the high-tech part. It’s not even in space. A lot of bunks for what seems like minimal staff; constant sound of heavy construction overheard; a single research laboratory, door shut, which Newt knows to belong to this universe’s Newt. (All of this goes into Newt’s log, too.)

“Presumably occupied by this Newt’s lab partner, who would apparently freak out if he saw me,” Newt says, “otherwise I’d investigate in there, too.” A metal clang from overhead that makes the whole ceiling vibrate: something _ big _ moving. Newt smiles. “...I think I’m going to check that out instead.”

* * *

“He was gone for a _ minute_,” Newt says, staring down the long, empty hallway. “How the hell did he get that far in a minute? _ Ugh_. Okay. Let me think.” He runs his fingers through his hair. “You guys, go back to my room. Uh. Actually—Doc—?”

“I’ll help you look,” Mother Newt says, before Dr. Geiszler even has the chance to open his mouth. More of his weird agenda of Newt not being alone with him, Newt guesses—Newt can’t be bothered to give a shit right now, as long as there’s _ someone _ to keep an eye on Siren Newt (who calmed down a little, at least, once Mother Newt hauled him over to the bathtub and turned on the water), and someone to keep _ him _ from tearing his hair out. 

“Cool,” Newt sighs. “Doc, make sure he doesn’t eat my action figures or whatever. We’ll be right back.”

They’re not: ten minutes, and still no sign of Sexy Newt. Not even as far as the lab. Newt stares at the door and chews on his lip. “He wouldn’t have gone in there, right?” he says. Hermann would’ve known in a second it wasn’t Newt, and Newt’s phone would’ve blown up with panicked texts. 

“He might’ve,” Mother Newt says, and amends, “I mean, _ we _ would’ve, right?”

“Shit,” Newt says, because he’s right. Huge, shiny lab, full of huge, shiny tanks, and one prickly-sexy mathematician—there’s no way any Newt would be able to resist that. “Okay,” he warns Mother Newt, “play it cool.”

Hermann, his glasses pushed up to the end of his nose, is filling out paperwork when Newt and Mother Newt inch inside. For a moment, Newt thinks he hasn’t seen them, and then—pen not slowing once—he says “I see you’ve finally decided to make an appearance. About bloody time.” He dots an _ i _viciously and turns a glare on Newt, a glare that fades the instant he catches sight of Mother Newt. “I—oh.”

“Hiya,” Mother Newt says.

Hermann flattens his hair anxiously; he slips off his glasses; he straightens his posture. “Er. Good afternoon,” he says. “I’m terribly sorry for—”

“No sweat,” Mother Newt says. He grins. “I dig your sweater. Looks good on you.”

A fine red blush spreads down from the tips of Hermann’s ears. “That’s _ very _ kind of you.”

Newt clears his throat. “Hey, Hermann,” he says, loudly, mostly just so he can interrupt whatever’s going on here, because he’s pretty sure Hermann’s answer will be _ no_, “totally hypothetical question, but did you see a guy who looks like me without pants wander by earlier?”

Hermann startles, like he’s forgotten Newt’s there, and then he turns to him with narrowed eyes. “What on earth is that supposed to mean? You didn’t try to clone yourself again, did you?”

“What?” Newt forces a laugh; next to him, Mother Newt laughs, too, but a little too loudly. (Newt tried the clone thing exactly one time, and no one’s let him forget it since.) “No. Ha. It’s—did you see him, anyway? Me?”

“_No_, I haven’t,” Hermann says. “What—?”

They hurry out of the lab. 

They haven’t even made it down the next hallway when someone behind them calls “Hey, Dr. Geiszler?”

Newt and Mother Newt turn in unison. “Yes?” They say, also in unison.

It’s Miguel, the tech from that morning in LOCCENT, arm miraculously healed, and he’s—scooped Sexy Newt up in his arms and is carrying him towards them. Oh. Convenient. “Found this guy wandering the jaeger bay,” Miguel says. He smiles goofily at Sexy Newt, who smiles back. One of his arms is flung around Miguel’s neck. “He almost fell over a railing. I think his ankle’s twisted—he, uh, kinda knocked over a bunch of equipment.”

“Nothing important, right?” Mother Newt says.

Miguel doesn’t answer, which means yes.

“I’m _ so _sorry,” Sexy Newt says. He pulls on a strand of Miguel’s hair and flutters his eyelashes; Newt can practically see the hearts in Miguel’s eyes. “Thank you for catching me. Again.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Newt says, feeling vaguely like he wants nothing more than to go back to his room and scream into a pillow. Is this what being a single father is like? Scratch that—is this what _ Newt’s dad _felt like? He should remember to send Father’s Day cards more often. “We’ll take it from here, dude.”

Miguel places Sexy Newt on the ground gently, looking like he wants to do anything but stop touching him; Sexy Newt stumbles forward and back into his arms. “Careful,” Miguel laughs, and Sexy Newt bats his eyelashes again. “Ankle still hurting?”

“Eh,” Sexy Newt says. “It’ll be better in a few minutes. It usually is.” He swats at Miguel's arm—the arm wounded by Siren Newt, which Newt is surprised to see has healed completely without even so much as a scar—and winks. “Just like this.”

Then he leans in and whispers something in Miguel’s ear that makes Miguel startle backwards against the wall and turn bright red. “Dr.—Dr. Geiszler!” he stammers. Sexy Newt frowns. “That’s a little _ fast_.”

“Oh,” Sexy Newt says. “Is it?”

Mother Newt scurries forward and snags Sexy Newt’s arm, somehow—despite the fact they’re the _ same person_, with absolutely zero height difference—managing to loom above him like a disappointed, well, mother. “I’m really sorry, dude,” he says to Miguel. “He does things a little, uh, differently.” He gives Sexy Newt’s arm a tug and levels another Stern Look at him. “C’mon, Newt. You should’ve known better than to run off like that.”

“Sorry,” Sexy Newt sighs, hanging his head in shame. He allows himself to be marched down the hall.

“Wait!” Miguel calls after him. “We could always do dinner!”

* * *

Newt’s metaphorical to-do list was always fairly straight-forward and simple before now—it consisted of exactly one thing, and that was _ Save the World _ (okay, two things, _ save the world _ and _ make Hermann fall in love with you _ )—but it’s expanded noticeably in the last twenty-four hours. Save the world. Make Hermann fall in love with you. Send the other Newts back home. Discover how they _ got here _ in the first place. Salvage the Pokemon shirt. Drift with a kaiju brain? Point is—Newt has a lot of work to get done, and out of the five Hims, only two seem like they’d be actually helpful, even if one of them is a potential Hermann-stealing hussy.

Siren Newt is easily distracted (content, apparently, to splash around in a cold bathtub with a platter of raw chicken bribed out of the mess hall kitchen and every single shiny thing Newt dug up from his bedroom), and easily locked in the bathroom until they can properly Newt-Proof the lab, but Sexy Newt is proving harder to deter. He’s so fucking _ eager to please_, damn him, and a walking disaster who refuses to stay in one place at that—no way Newt can take him into the lab. He’d break everything he touched, and _ Hermann_—

Hermann.

“That’s an awful idea,” Mother Newt says.

“We're going to have to tell him eventually,” Newt points out.

They just need someone to watch the little guy, is all.

* * *

Hermann doesn’t say anything while Newt explains their multi-Newted Predicament, just sort of...clutches at the door. Mouth hanging open. He’s edging into the _ deathly _ territory of pale, and, twice, Newt thinks he may be on the verge of a stroke. In hindsight he’s glad he offered to take Sexy Newt down here on his own. Two Newts—one of which is dressed in what appears to be latex booty shorts and a bra, no way that can be comfortable—is clearly already _ more _ than enough for the guy.

“Just—keep an eye on him, okay?” Newt says. “Make sure he doesn’t get into any trouble.”

“Keep an _ eye _ on him?” Hermann sputters. “I’m not a _ babysitter_.”

“And he’s not a baby, so it works out great,” Newt says, though he does consider advising Hermann to babyproof his quarters anyway—door double-locked and dead-bolted, sharp things hidden out of reach. Taking precautions, and all that. Newt’s never seen someone stumble into as much shit as this version of him; he fell twice on the way over here alone, each time landing with his ass stuck out into the air like a walking pin-up model.

Newt grabs Sexy Newt—who’d been _ posing _in the middle of the hallway, hip jutted out at an angle, hand resting on that, and gazing around in wonder like he’d never seen a hallway before—by the arm and hauls him over. “Newt, this is Hermann. Hermann, this is Newt.”

Sexy Newt flashes Hermann a bright smile. “Hi, Hermann!”

“Newt,” Hermann says, curtly, and then proceeds to not-too-subtly check Sexy Newt out, eyes dragging from the white strap top all the way down to the thigh highs, where they linger a bit too long for Newt’s liking.

“Hey.” Newt snaps his fingers. “His eyes are up here, hotshot.”

Hermann turns to Newt guiltily. He’s gone pink. “Er.” He clears his throat. “What were we…?”

Newt nudges Sexy Newt right at Hermann. It’s a mistake: Sexy Newt stumbles with a little _ oof!_, exactly as he’s been doing all day, and Newt’s sure he would’ve landed on the ground with his ass out again if Hermann hadn’t darted forward swiftly to catch him in the curve of his arm. He stares up at Hermann as dazedly as Hermann had been staring at him. Newt sighs. “Just...entertain him until we get back,” he says. “He’s from outer space. You like outer space. Talk about outer space.”

“Hi,” Sexy Newt says again, looking both delighted and at home in Hermann’s arms already. He reaches up and palms at Hermann’s undercut. The fuzziness of it seems to only delight him more, like he’s never felt anything like it before. (Somehow, this guy’s an incredibly competent engineer who’s been to no less than six different galaxies.) “Ha, cool,” he says, then “Seriously, dude, you don’t have to watch me, I can help out just—”

“How am I meant to entertain him, exactly?” Hermann interrupts.

“I don’t know!” Newt says. “He’s _ me_. Just—do whatever you’d do with me.”

There’s a terse pause. 

“Take him to the lab or something, is what I mean,” Newt clarifies quickly. “I’m gonna—okay. Bye.”

* * *

Hermann had already been having a long day, frankly, before Newton showed up shouting about parallel realities and doppelgangers and rubbish like that, and a very small part of him—the part that’s not absolutely reeling over it all, because it is _ all _ very fascinating—is saying _ well, of course, may as well_! May as well happen today. Aliens rising from an interdimensional portal in the ocean isn’t enough, better toss in a few extra Newton Geiszlers, one of whom is strutting about Hermann’s quarters like a model for a lingerie catalogue and fondling everything within reach. (Heaven help Hermann.)

“So, Hermann,” Newt—because it’s easier to think of this one as _ Newt_, an entity entirely separate from Hermann’s own _ Newton_—says, after three long, long minutes of the excruciating silence following Newton’s departure.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” Hermann corrects. An entity separate from Newton, not Hermann’s Newton, which means he’ll address Hermann as anyone who is not Newton would. 

“Dr. Gottlieb,” Newt corrects. “Nice place. Can I sit down somewhere?”

Hermann nods; to his abject horror, Newt bypasses his desk chair completely and flops, face-down, onto his bed, rear stuck out into the air in a way that’s almost comically sexual. The groan he lets out is loud enough to make Hermann flush from his ears to his neck. Hermann clears his throat again. “Er. Are you alright?”

“Long day,” Newt mumbles. He rolls clumsily to his side, one elbow propping himself up, body angled in a way that’s somehow even more sexual than before. This is worse, Hermann decides. This is far, _ far _worse. “Your bed is comfortable.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. Newt’s shorts are very short. Barely even shorts, really, more undergarments than anything. One of his thigh highs has begun to slip down. How easy it would be for Hermann to fix it for him—how easy it would be for Hermann to take it off _ entirely_, to run his fingers over each inch of newly-bared calf, thigh, to slip higher, and higher. (He has nearly the same tattoos as Newton—how strange.)

He realizes Newt is watching him a second too late to play it off, and makes to turn away, to stammer out his apologies (_his eyes are up there, hotshot_, Newton said), but Newt merely smiles coyly at him. He splays his fingers out over his bare abdomen. “Wanna have sex?” he says.

It takes Hermann a full minute to recover. “That’s not,” he wheezes, while Newt sits, cross-legged, on the bed, eyebrows furrowed as if he can’t figure out what he’s said wrong, “that’s not typically how it’s _ done _here.”

“How what’s done?” Newt says.

Hermann waggles his fingers vaguely between them. “Strangers don’t typically run about—doing—well—you know. With each other.”

“We’re not strangers,” Newt says. “You’re Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, and you’re my lab partner in this dimension. Obviously I trust you.”

“_Technically_,” Hermann says, “technically, Newt, we _ are _strangers—”

Newt interrupts him, sounding strangely put out. “So you don’t want to have sex with me?”

“I didn’t say that!” Hermann says. “Er. That’s not—oh, bugger.” He puts his head in his hands and sighs, loudly.

There’s a hand on his shoulder. “It’s the opposite where I come from,” Newt says, suddenly a lot closer. “Sex is great. I love sex.” He squeezes Hermann’s shoulder. “It’s how I thank people, or meet people, or have fun with—”

“Food,” Hermann says too-loudly. “Would you like some food? You must be hungry.” Dimension-hopping ought to make a man hungry. At the very least, it’d save Hermann from _ this_. Not to say that it’s unpleasant. The opposite, in fact. Hermann happens to think that everything about this Newt was designed by some higher power to appeal to Hermann in every possible way—which is precisely the problem. If he doesn’t get out of here soon he’s going to do something he’ll regret for the simple fact of how _ guilty _he’ll feel when Newton returns.

“Oh,” Newt says. The hand from Hermann’s shoulder retreats. “Uh. Yeah, sure. I guess I am.”

The next matter of business is Newt’s clothing—there’s simply no way he can be seen in public dressed how he is, no way anyone would possibly believe that he is Newton Geiszler. Newton Geiszler wears ripped jeans and stained t-shirts and skinny ties as thin as a pencil. Newton Geiszler does not trot around in...this. He’d cause a riot. Worse—people _ besides _ Hermann will be looking at Newt the way Hermann looks at Newt in the ripped jeans and stained shirts. Hermann is not possessive, not really, not to an _ unhealthy _extent, but, you know, he has—certain senses of propriety.

“You’re welcome to borrow a shirt,” he tells Newt pointedly. “Perhaps some trousers. You must be cold.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Newt says. He plucks at the white fabric of his top. “I’m comfy.”

“Really,” Hermann says, “I think you ought to borrow a shirt, Newton. Er—Newt.”

Newt deflates a bit; he looks as disappointed as he had when Hermann told him he didn’t want to have sex. “Oh,” he says. “Do you not like what I’m wearing?”

Hermann grits his teeth. _ On the contrary_, is what he wants to say, _ I like it very, very much_. “That’s not exactly what’s _ worn _ here, either,” is what he ends up saying.

Hermann turns away while Newt, quite amenable to it all, changes from his long gloves, tiny shorts, thigh-highs, and strappy top into one of Hermann’s older button-ups and his single pair of jeans; Hermann startles, violently, when he turns back around. The shirt should’ve been tight in the waist, but long enough to cover Newt’s torso, the sleeves _definitely _long enough to cover his hands, the trousers undoubtedly baggy and in need of being cuffed—it’s a far cry from the crop-top and tight skinny jeans Newt’s in now. 

“Where on Earth did you get that?” Hermann says, once he’s remembered how to speak.

Newt looks down at himself. “From you?” he says. “This is what you gave me.”

His bellybutton is exposed, as are the soft curves of his sides, and when he stretches up both arms to model the _ crop top _ the fabric rides up enough to give Hermann a peek of his pectorals. Hermann inhales sharply. “Different shirt,” he says, “ah, different shirt, different shirt—”

He digs a little deeper in his closet until he finds one of Newton’s hoodies—left here, presumably, after an impromptu sleepover—and tosses it at Newt. If it’s big on Newton, it’s _ sure _to fit Newt.

It doesn’t. It becomes skin-tight and barely long enough to reach Newt’s abdomen the moment Newt slips it on, and the sweatpants Hermann tosses at him, blindly, in the next second fall far above Newt’s knees and cling tight enough to his rear end to be obscene. Newt looks just as bewildered as Hermann feels.

“I’ve never tried wearing normal clothing before,” he says. He twirls in a circle to examine himself in Hermann’s floor-length mirror, beaming all the while. “Ha! Weird.”

“Quite,” Hermann agrees, in another wheeze.

They give up and go to the mess hall like that. Newt attracts _looks_, of course. No one even attempts to be subtle about it. Conceivably, this Newt could be Newton Geiszler, if Newton Geiszler had a tendency to bat his eyelashes or cling to Hermann’s arm as they walked down the Shatterdome corridors, or if Newton Geiszler didn’t wear glasses but did wear strange goggles and a great deal of mascara, or if Newton Geiszler managed to make every little thing he did sultry and damnably _seductive_, even something as mundane as bending over to fix his boot.

Even something as mundane as eating. Hermann can’t decide if it’s Newt’s evident reality-altering powers or just a terrible, terrible coincidence that everything the mess hall is serving tonight is either messy or vaguely_ phallic _ in form. Regardless, Newt doesn’t have to be so...enthusiastic about it all. Hermann watches him put away two bananas and moan his way through a plate of noodles (which require, of course, a great deal of puckering his lips to properly suck them down) without a single peep (though he does clench his silverware very, very tight), and it’s not until Newt spills half a glass of water down himself—down his lips, his throat—that Hermann finally has to momentarily excuse himself to the toilets.

He returns after some heavy breathing exercises. Newt has moved onto ice cream, which is to say, he has moved onto sucking on a spoon with brief intervals of flicking his tongue across it and moaning contentedly. He greets Hermann with a bright smile and drops his spoon to the table. (This Newt is a _ lot _more excited to see Hermann than Hermann’s Newton ever is.) “Hey, dude,” he says.

Hermann nods curtly in his direction.

To his surprise, when he takes his seat, Newt scoots right up to him. “So what’s the deal between you and this universe’s me?” he says. “I don’t have a Hermann where I am. I feel like I’m missing out.”

“We’re scientists,” Hermann says. “We—”

“I know _ that_,” Newt says. “I meant _ between _you. Do you have sex?”

Hermann flushes brilliantly for the second time that evening. “_No_,” he says, but that’s not entirely true, and this Newt is strangely earnest to the point that Hermann can’t help but divulge the actual truth. “Well. Once.”

They’d been tipsy, and giddy, and Newton had walked an unstable Hermann back to his bunk, and somehow ended up arguing ferociously, and—well— “A few months ago,” Hermann says. “Er. We haven’t talked about it.” Newton avoided him for the following week, and Hermann avoided him, assuming he _wanted _to be avoided, and after that, it seemed gauche to bring it up again. Hermann would like to talk about it. Hermann would like to do it again.

“Do you want to have more sex with him?” Newt says.

Hermann casts his eyes down to his plate. After a few seconds, he nods. “Very much so.”

Newt pats his hand sympathetically. “Offer still stands to have sex with me, if you want. It’s all I can do to show you how _ grateful _ I am.” He sucks on his ice cream spoon for emphasis; he waggles his eyebrows. “I’ve been told my stamina is impressive.”

It’s not as if Newton will _ mind_, Hermann reasons. They're practically the same person. He doesn’t even have to know.

* * *

Newt’s phone has been suspiciously silent this whole time since he shoved Sexy Newt off on Hermann. He expected angry texts or something, maybe a few demands that Newt come pick him up right this instant, questions as to what Sexy Newt eats, like he’s some sort of badly behaved cat, but other than a single thumbs-up emoji in response to Newt’s _ all good? _text half an hour ago Newt hasn’t heard a fucking peep. And Hermann never uses emojis. He’s probably pissed at Newt. 

Whatever—Newt’s here to pick up Sexy Newt, so Hermann can finally sulk about it all in peace.

“Hermann!” Newt calls, pounding on Hermann’s door. “Hermann, buddy, you in?”

Nothing from inside.

“Hermann?” Newt calls again.

The handle turns; a moment later, Hermann pokes his head out. His hair’s messier than Newt’s ever seen it, and there’s a weird pink flush spreading down his neck. He was probably asleep—it’s late, after all, and the light in his room is shut off. “Newton?” he says, squinting.

“Howdy, partner,” Newt says. “I’m here for you-know-who. Can I come in?”

Hermann shoots a nervous look over his shoulder. “Er,” he says. “Well—”

“You didn’t lose him, did you?” Newt jokes, but Hermann’s reaction makes him actually worry he did.

“A moment,” Hermann says. “If you will.”

The door shuts. There’s whispering, the sound of drawers slamming, and then Hermann opens the door a crack wider. He’s in sweatpants and a t-shirt now. “You have that on backwards,” Newt points out, poking Hermann in the chest.

“Do I?” Hermann says, looking down at himself. “How strange. I wonder how I managed that.”

“Hey, Herm,” Sexy Newt says from within the room, and Hermann turns. “Can you help me?”

Newt seizes his chance and pushes the door open, mostly to find out why Hermann’s being so fucking _ weird _ about this all. He regrets it almost immediately: Sexy Newt is there all right, wearing his thigh-highs and the skimpiest little silk robe (emblazoned with the PPDC logo) Newt’s ever seen, hair messier than Hermann’s, hickeys down his neck, lounging across Hermann’s bed like he hasn’t got a fucking care in the world. Hermann’s bed, which has _ undeniably _seen some action.

Sexy Newt gives him a bright smile and hops to his feet. “Hi!”

Before Newt can form a coherent response, Hermann clacks over in a red-faced flurry and immediately belts Sexy Newt’s robe for him. “Your clothing shrunk again,” Sexy Newt tells him. “Sorry.”

“Hermann,” Newt says. “Can I talk to you outside for a second? Alone?”

“Ah,” Hermann says hesitantly, one hand curled protectively around Sexy Newt’s waist. “Yes. I suppose. If you don’t mind, Newt—”

Sexy Newt stretches up and leaves a kiss on Hermann’s cheek; Hermann turns twice as red. “Okay!”

“I can’t believe you,” Newt hisses the second they’re alone. “I told you to _ babysit _him! Not—” He searches desperately for a euphemism. “—canoodle.”

“He was very persuasive!” Hermann says. He hasn’t looked Newt in the eyes once. “And very...attractive. Who I—well—_canoodle _ with is none of your business anyway.”

“It is if it’s me!” Newt says, then, as Hermann straightens out his shoulders and sniffs, repeats, “I can’t believe you. I can’t _ believe _you. Some pretty boy in underwear makes eyes at you, and—”

“He’s not some pretty boy,” Hermann says, defensive. “You said it yourself. He’s _ you_.”

Newt goes almost as red as Hermann. “Yeah, well,” he says, “well, whatever, that’s—that’s besides the point. That makes it worse, actually. You had sex with _ me_. Newt!”

Sexy Newt slinks out into the hallway and latches onto Hermann’s side almost immediately. (Where’d he managed to find a PPDC-issued robe like _ that_, anyway? Ugh.) “Yeah?” He hasn’t lost his cheery smile.

“Get dressed,” Newt says. “We need you for, uh, important business.”

They don’t, really, but if Newt had to watch Hermann continue to make big pretty eyes back at a sexier version of him much longer, he might’ve snapped and done something drastic. Possibly commit Newticide. (Two Hermann-stealing hussies to worry about, apparently.) It backfires in the end, because Hermann insists on tagging along with them, and Newt can hear him and Sexy Newt, who’s still hanging off Hermann’s arm, talking in hushed whispers the entire way to the lab. “It’s extraordinary,” Hermann is saying, “I’ve had a bloody awful pain in my neck all day, and you—”

“That happens a lot,” Sexy Newt laughs, and then his voice turns sultry. Newt seethes. Only a little. “There are a _ lot _of things I can do, Hermann.”

“Here!” Newt shouts.

Dr. Geiszler is poking around through Newt’s files and Mother Newt is attempting to coax Siren Newt back into his small metal tub when Newt unceremoniously flings the lab door open and steers Hermann inside. Dr. Geiszler flashes Newt a smile. Mother Newt—clearly exhausted—nods hello. Siren Newt scowls. Hermann, meanwhile, seems to take in the shock of multiple Newts all over again: his wide eyes drift from Dr. Geiszler, to Siren Newt, before settling finally on— “It’s you!” he exclaims, pointing a shaky finger at Mother Newt.

“Guilty,” Mother Newt says. He turns to Newt. “Did you tell him?”

“Yep,” Newt says.

“Yeah, so, not actually Newt’s cousin,” Mother Newt says. He wipes his wet hands off on his jeans (tighter than the kind that Newt wears _ now_) and winks. “Hi, Hermann. Still a _ pleasure_. You look even better than I remember.”

Hermann blushes. Newt grits his teeth. “_Right_,” he says. “Hermann, this is me from a parallel universe in the future. His Newt Code Name is Mother Newt, for reasons that will definitely blow your mind so I’m not gonna say.” He points to Dr. Geiszler. “This is _ also _me from a parallel universe in the future. Call him Dr. Geiszler.” He points to Siren Newt. “And this is me from a parallel universe where I’m an evil mermaid and you’re a vampire.”

“Stop calling me that!” Siren Newt says.

“Fine. Where I’m an evil _ siren _ and you’re a vampire. He’s Siren Newt.” Newt stares at him with no small amount of bitterness. “He ate my vintage Pokemon shirt. Vintage. He _ate_ it.”

“If you’ll excuse me a moment,” Hermann says, and promptly falls into a nearby chair.

All the Newts with functioning human legs—including Newt himself—rush to his aid. Sexy Newt in particular; he situates himself on Hermann’s knee like he belongs there and immediately starts stroking back his hair and cooing over him. “You okay, Herm?”

“Do you need a glass of water?” Newt says.

“Smelling salts?” Dr. Geiszler says, smirking.

“It’s—a lot to take in,” Hermann says. He gazes up at Mother Newt, blinking owlishly, and lifts a hand halfway towards his scruffy grey chin. “I must say, Newton—the beard suits you.”

Mother Newt grins and drags his own hand along it. “My Hermann’s a big fan of it, too,” he says. 

“_Your _Hermann?” Hermann says. “You mean—?”

“Everyone has a Hermann but me,” Sexy Newt says glumly.

And it’s going to stay that way. “Okay, give him some space,” he says, raising his voice; Mother Newt and Dr. Geiszler step back. Sexy Newt does not. “We have work to—”

There’s a loud crash, followed by smaller wet smashing sounds: Siren Newt, apparently escaped from the metal tub, has toppled over a shelf of _ very important things _of Newt’s. Including a few preserved samples. Cloudy green-blue liquid is seeping fast across the metal floor. “No!” Mother Newt scolds. He rushes to his side and hoists Siren Newt’s arm up above his head before he can grab a shard of glass and accidentally cut himself. Or maybe wield it as a weapon, who knows. “Come on, dude.”

“I said to _ Newt-Proof _this place, guys!” Newt shouts.

They get the mess cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time, and Mother Newt gets Siren Newt calmed down enough to stop brandishing the broken glass at them, which Newt thinks counts as a win. “I still don’t think I quite understand everything,” Hermann says. Sexy Newt, thankfully, has left his lap (in favor of exploring the lab instead), but Mother Newt (who brought him the glass of water) is sitting a little closer to him than Newt likes. “The Breach re-opened again? _ Multiple _ times? Right in the middle of LOCCENT?” 

Twenty questions, apparently. “Sort of,” Newt says. “It did, but it wasn’t the whole Breach. It was like—a teeny piece of it.”

“Fell right on my ass,” Dr. Geiszler says. While they were all cleaning, he was rummaging around through the salvaged tech scraps Newt keeps in the supply closet, and he’s currently tinkering away with them across the room at Newt’s workbench. “All of us did.”

“He came through first,” Newt says, “and everyone else followed. Now we’re just trying to get everyone home.” Newt’s not sure what kind of universal catastrophes could emerge from all of them—a handful of Newts, all from different realities, different _ points in time_, even—being in the same place at once, but it doesn’t seem like something they should allow to happen for much longer. Maybe if Dr. Geiszler steps on a butterfly Newt’s Earth is doomed after all. Or maybe they’ll start to fade out of existence, one by one, Newt after Newt, _ Back to the Future Style_.

Or maybe they already _ have _started. Was it really only four Newts who came through, or…?

Hermann’s thoughtful hum drags Newt out of his downward panic spiral. He’s watching Dr. Geiszler intently. “And how, exactly, are you going to manage that?”

“Me?” Dr. Geiszler says. He gives Hermann an easy smile and waves a bit of rusted wire at him. “I’m gonna make the machine that gets us home.”

“So he _ claims_,” Mother Newt says under his breath. Probably for Hermann’s benefit: Newt was there, after all, after he’d dropped Sexy Newt off at Hermann’s, when Dr. Geiszler proposed he be the one to take the reins in all this and Mother Newt put up a hell of a fuss. (_It’s my job, jackass_, Dr. Geiszler said, _ this is the kind of work I do, now._)

If Dr. Geiszler hears, he doesn’t give any indication. Just keeps squinting and poking at the wire. “Hey, Newt,” he calls over. “Can you come over here and help me, buddy?”

Newt hops to his feet.

Dr. Geiszler has him doing mostly boring, mundane shit—switching out wrench sizes, running back to the supply closet for more wiring, occasionally holding something in place so Dr. Geiszler can twist in a screw—while _ he _does all the fun stuff, so it’s no surprise that, after a little while, Newt’s almost zoned out completely. It takes him a few seconds to realize Dr. Geiszler’s saying his name. 

“—wt. Newt. Newt.”

“Shit,” Newt says, “uh, sorry. What do you need me to hold down?”

Dr. Geiszler is giving him a kind smile. “Nothing,” he says. “I was just wondering—” And here he lowers his voice. “—if you’ve given my idea any more consideration.”

Newt glances, nervously, to Hermann.

“He’s distracted,” Dr. Geiszler says, in that same low voice. “Look.”

Hermann is: Mother Newt has him engaged, deeply, in conversation, occasionally laughing, occasionally reaching out and touching Hermann’s arm, while Hermann just sits there and eats it all up. (Must be pretty interesting stuff, Newt thinks bitterly. Probably talking about all the awesome kaiju he’s raised, and how rich he is, and how awesome he and his Hermann are doing.) “The drifting?” Newt says, dragging his eyes away from them. “With the…?”

Dr. Geiszler nods. “Hand me the screwdriver, will you?”

Newt passes it to him. Dr. Geiszler twists in another screw into whatever he’s creating—some sort of sphere—with his tongue between his teeth. Just the way Newt does when he’s concentrating. They’re the same person, so of course he does, of course Newt shouldn’t be surprised, but the uncanniness of staring at a better-groomed reflection of himself still gives him the strongest sense sense of vertigo. (He’ll be glad when this is all over.) “I have thought about it,” Newt says.

“And?” Dr. Geiszler passes the screwdriver back to him.

“It just seems—really dangerous,” Newt admits. At the look Dr. Geiszler levels him, he cracks a thin smile. Yeah, Newt’s not exactly Self-Preservationist of the year, he’s aware, thanks, he’s always a little too happy to throw his head on the chopping block in the name of science. But this _ does _ seem more dangerous than the shenanigans Newt usually gets up to. Especially by not involving Hermann. Hermann’s always there to pull him back when he does something _ really _dumb. “I don’t know, man, I mean—Hermann and I—”

“Hermann treats you like _ shit_, dude,” Dr. Geiszler says, and that startles Newt into shutting up fast. “He mocks you. He doesn’t take you seriously. He screwed you and pretended it _ never happened_.”

Apparently this is a constant across their timelines—and boy, doesn’t that make Newt feel like a million bucks. “He doesn’t—” Newt stammers.

“He screwed the other you, too,” Dr. Geiszler says, with a nod towards Sexy Newt, who’s tapping at the tank of one of Newt’s kaiju samples and laughing. “And now…” He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to; across the room, Mother Newt’s still leaning in, still touching Hermann’s arm, and Hermann is smiling in a way he _ never _smiles at Newt.

Newt’s hand tightens around the screwdriver. _ You impress him_, Dr. Geiszler said. Hermann wants someone impressive—someone like Mother Newt, mellow and handsome, who raises kaiju, someone like Dr. Geiszler, well-respective and loaded, who walks around in fancy suits. Someone like one of the men Newt can apparently become. (Definitely not the man Newt is now.) “Did it hurt?” Newt finally.

“Not at all,” Dr. Geiszler says.

* * *

The hunk of kaiju brain they sent Newt—of no small sacrifice to his paycheck, at that—is sitting in the very back of his specimen fridge, partially hidden behind a spleen he’s dissected to hell and back at this point. He didn’t tell Hermann when it arrived.

Newt considers it, now, sprawled out on the ratty area rug they keep beneath the lab couch, takeout container balanced on his chest, watching the fluorescent lights flicker above him. He’d need actual drift tech. Defunct helmets he can spark back to life. Or maybe just one—it’s not like the brain has a _ head_, after all. He thinks Hermann has old drift data stored on USBs or floppy discs or whatever the hell the grandpa stores shit on buried in his desk somewhere that Newt could upload to his laptop. He also thinks he has drift tech already, equally buried by other scrap in his supply closet.

“I think I’m almost done,” Dr. Geiszler announces.

Newt sits up, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses and moving his box of vegetables to the floor: Dr. Geiszler is standing proudly next to the most convoluted assortment of wires and hunks of metal Newt has ever seen. 

“Great,” Mother Newt says, breaking the silence. They’ve been waiting around for what’s felt like hours. It probably _ has _ been hours. There’s no clock in the lab, no windows, so there’s no real way to judge time, and Newt hasn’t slept in around forty-eight hours at this point anyway. They got dinner at one point, at least. “Uh—what is it gonna do?”

“It’s gonna take us home, that’s what,” Dr. Geiszler says. “Hermann—when does your predictive model say the Breach will open again? And I mean _ actually _open, not another little blip.”

Hermann—flanked by Mother Newt on his right (who’s untucked his shirt) and Sexy Newt on his left (head pressed to the crook of Hermann’s neck, sucking down noodles in a way that seems unnecessarily sexual)—seems grateful for the chance to disentangle himself and rise to his feet. “Three days from now,” he declares. “Around sunrise. I’ve already alerted our proper superiors, of course—”

“Perfect,” Dr. Geiszler says. He crosses his arms. “Well, guys, if this thing works, _and _if I manage to finish it on time, it’s gonna send us right back the way we came the second the Breach opens.”

The announcement draws mixed reactions. Siren Newt—picking apart another plate of raw meat—is pleased. Mother Newt—face drawing up into a frown, a squint—is skeptical. Sexy Newt—rushing over to Hermann’s side—is _ wildly _ disappointed. And Newt? Newt’s fucking ecstatic. The sooner this is over, the better. “Already?” Sexy Newt says. He shoots Hermann big eyes. “But I’m having _ fun_.”

“You don’t _ have _ to go home,” Dr. Geiszler says, “but the sooner the better, and since we know for certain when the Breach’ll re-open, _ and _ we don’t know what the risks of all of us staying for much longer are—”

“Sooner the better,” Newt says, firmly. 

They decide to camp out in the lab for the night after agreeing there’s no way they’d all be able to fit in Newt’s bunk. Everyone except Hermann, at least, who makes a beeline back for his bedroom without even bothering to make excuses. Newt drags out the two ancient cots they keep in storage for emergencies (Sexy Newt claims one, Dr. Geiszler the other), and Mother Newt does up a few pillow-blanket beds on the floor for him and Newt. In theory, it’s a fine idea, but Newt can’t fall asleep for the fucking _ life _of him. Too nervous, maybe. Too excited.

Too fixated on the kaiju brain bobbing up and down, innocuously, out of sight, in its storage tank a hundred feet away.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lab sleepovers and Shatterdome tours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG, i ended up adding about 2k words this morning lol
> 
> final chapter coming either today or tomorrow, depends on when i finish editing!!!

Dr. Geiszler insists on having _ absolute _ privacy to continue his work on the machine the next morning, so—after claiming Newt as his personal assistant (“It’s like having interns all over again,” he declares happily), and after Mother Newt insists on being there, too, _ just in case_, and after Hermann appears briefly only to announce he’s going off to shower, and then stare between Newt and Sexy Newt in embarrassment—they’ve just got to decide what to do with Sexy Newt and Siren Newt for the day.

“We should probably get him some fresh water,” Mother Newt says, squinting at Sexy Newt’s tub with his hands on his hips. “Maybe put him somewhere bigger, too. It’s not good for him to be in something as small and stagnant as—”

“What do you suggest, then?” Newt says. Snaps, really—he slept shittily, okay. He kept having weird dreams. And his patience has been running very thin for the past...day? Day and a half? He lost track. “We dump him in the fucking ocean?”

“Ocean?” Siren Newt echoes.

He starts to hoist himself from his tub, and Mother Newt hurries over to nudge him back in. Newt feels a surge of guilt: he hadn’t known the guy was listening in. It’s not like they actually _ can _ dump him in the ocean, after all, not unless they want him ending up with kaiju blue poisoning like the majority of the late Pacific coastline sealife. “No, no, no,” Mother Newt says. “Sorry, dude, it’s _ way _too polluted for you.”

Siren Newt sinks back into the water in disappointment. His fins—hanging well over the side—give a weak flick. “I don’t have any room,” he says. “And it’s boring. I don’t want to just sit here for three days.”

“We could find a bigger tank?” Newt offers. “I think we have some down in the jaeger bay junk storage. I usually move the empty ones down there when I finish with a specimen.” The tank Newt’s thinking of in particular housed a significantly large chunk of kaiju stomach that he had the time of his life poking around in, and that Hermann had the time of his life complaining about. It’ll need a quick hose-down, and it’ll be a bitch to drag back here, but between the three of them it shouldn’t take too long. Hopefully no one’s stolen it to raise a pet shark or something.

“Perfect,” Mother Newt says. “Lead the way.” 

* * *

Hermann returns from his shower and a brief walk outside the Shatterdome to the laboratory in a fresh sweatervest, carrying a cardboard travel container of four coffees and a small paper bag of pastries in one hand. Courtesy of an excursion to one of the only Starbucks still open in the city. Hermann merely wanted fresh air and the chance to clear his head (he had a _ lot _of things to clear from it, after all), but his path took him by it by pure coincidence and he was reminded of Newton’s penchant for sugar. Now multiplied by five, he reasoned. It seems as good a way as any to, ah, extend the olive branch.

“Newton?” he calls when he nudges the lab door open. “Er—Newtons?”

There’s no one inside, save for the strange half-fish Newt draped in his tub and idly toying around with what looks to be a spare pair of Newton’s glasses. He perks up immediately. “Hermann!”

Hermann lingers in the doorway. “Hello,” he says, weakly. He doesn’t fancy the thought of getting too close to those deadly teeth. (He’s also blindsided, once again, by how much a majority of these Newts appear to like him.) “Where has everyone gone?”

“Getting me a bigger tank,” the Newt says. “I don’t know where the other one went. What are you holding?”

Hermann nearly forgot he went out. “Oh,” he says, “I don’t imagine you’d like them very much.” Or even be able to stomach them. He imagines this Newt, half-fish as he is, sticks to largely the same diet as any sea creature’s. Pastries likely out of bounds, coffee certainly so. “It's...human food.”

“Can I see?” Newt says.

Hermann fidgets; Newt doesn’t seem as if he’s going to bite his arm off, though, so he approaches him slowly and displays the coffee first. “They’re called iced lattes,” Hermann says. “It’s a drink. Newton—my Newton, that is—likes them.”

Newt pokes at the plastic cup with one sharp fingernail, and eyes the straw skeptically. He pokes that next. “What’s this thing?”

“A straw,” Hermann says. “You drink through it. Wait—!”

Before Hermann can stop him, Newt is ripping a coffee from the cardboard and sucking it down through the straw. He finishes quickly, gnaws curiously on the straw for a few seconds (taking out a sizable chunk), pulls off the lid to squint at the ice, and then tosses it all to the floor. “I liked that,” he says. “What’s in the bag?”

Wordlessly, Hermann sets the remaining three coffees down on Newton’s desk and hands the bag of pastries over. Newt tears through those even faster than the coffee. Including the bag. “I like that, too,” he declares. (Hermann's not sure whether he means the pastries or the bag.) “I’ve never eaten stuff like that before.”

“Oh?” Hermann says—he presumes he was right about Newt’s diet being a sea creature’s diet. That of a dolphin’s, perhaps, or other aquatic mammals. He draws out Newton’s desk chair and settles in next to the tub. “What do you typically eat?”

“Humans,” Newt says.

Hermann goes very still.

Newt grins sharply at him. “I’m kidding,” he says. “I eat fish.”

“Ah,” Hermann says, and breathes a small sigh of relief.

His relief fades in a second, when Newt doubles over the side of the tub and vomits into Newton’s nearby dustbin. Hermann nearly falls backwards in surprise. “Newt!” he exclaims. “Are you—”

Newt wipes his mouth off on his wrist and makes a face. Other than that, he seems fine. “I think you were right,” he says. “No human food.”

“But you’re—?”

“I’m alright,” Newt says. A small bit of water sloshes over the side of the tub and wets Hermann's shoes as Newt inches up closer to Hermann. “You know, my Hermann isn’t that much different than you. He brings me food a lot, too. And cool stuff he thinks I’d like.” He pulls his hand from the tub and displays his wrist to Hermann proudly: around it rest several elaborate bangles—gold, and silver, and set with jewels (most of which are a similar green to the flecks in Newt’s hazel eyes)—as well as a few arguably _ worthless _ bracelets of fraying rope and smooth, shining sea glass. “He gave me _ all _of these.”

Hermann makes a show of admiring them to appease him. “Very lovely,” he says. Expensive, too, most of them. Hermann imagines he must be very fond of this Newt. “Your Hermann—he’s not, ah, human, is he?”

Newt lowers his hand. “He’s not,” he says. “He’s—what did your Newt call them? A vampire. He lives in the castle by my sea.” He smiles, dangerous and sweet at the same time. “That’s how I met him.”

A vampire in a castle, and with a Newton still by his side. How strange, really—between the four Newtons who came through, only one of them evidently doesn’t have a Hermann. If Hermann were the romantic sort he might say it’s something akin to fate. “A vampire,” he echoes. He watches Newt shake his tangled mane of hair, swish his tail—long, scaled, a shining rainbow that shifts colors when it catches in the light of the fluorescents overhead. Unlike any fish Hermann’s ever seen. “That is very beautiful,” he says.

Newt ducks his head, almost bashful. “Thanks,” he says. “I like your legs, too. Why do you use that funny stick?”

He’s pointing to Hermann’s cane; Hermann raises it to give him a closer look at the worn handle. “I injured myself when I was very young,” he says. “It helps me walk. Does your Hermann not use one?”

“He probably does,” Newt says, and shrugs. “He usually just flies everywhere.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. “Of course.”

Newt folds his arms against the rim of the tub and leans in closer to Hermann, close enough to claw at him with those terrifying nails if he wanted. Hermann isn’t afraid this time. “What’s it like being human?” Newt says.

“It’s fine, I suppose,” Hermann says. “I happen to enjoy it.”

Newt presses one vaguely wet hand to Hermann’s dry one. He’s very cold. “Your skin is so much warmer than my Hermann’s,” Newt says. “Do you drink blood, too? Do you sleep during the day? I’m always awake before Hermann and it’s _ boring_.”

No, humans don’t drink blood, Hermann explains, and no, they sleep at night, yes, they wear clothing, no, they don’t lay eggs, yes, they have stuff like iced coffee and pastries fairly regularly, no, never raw meat, no, Hermann’s Newton is a vegetarian (that means he eats everything _ but _meat). When he’s moved on to explaining what the strange clear circles on a chain around his neck are (they do the same thing as Newton’s spare pair Hermann can see sitting at the bottom of Newt’s tub, he really ought to fish them out to give back to Newton), there’s suddenly a great deal of commotion in the hallway outside. 

Newton, the Newt Hermann previously made, er, acquaintance with, and the scruffy older Newt come stumbling in, toting a _ large _tank that looks more like something you’d find at an aquarium on another dolly behind them. It’s at least twice the size of mer-Newt’s tub. Possibly three times. (Instinctively, upon seeing them, Hermann smooths out his hair and brushes a bit of fuzz off his sweater.) “Hey, dude!” Newton calls. “We got you—” He sways to a halt when he sees Hermann. “Oh, hey. What are you doing here?”

“We were talking,” mer-Newt says. “Hermann gave me _ iced coffee_.”

“There’s one for you as well, and whoever else wants it,” Hermann says, giving a weak smile. Newton does not return it. A new day has clearly not made anything less awkward between them.

“Right,” Newton says, and coughs. “Anyway. It’s going to take a little while to wipe the tank down, fill it, add the appropriate salt levels—”

“That’s fine,” mer-Newt says. He grabs hold of Hermann’s wrist. “I want to keep talking to Hermann, anyway.”

“Right,” Newton says again. He casts Hermann a look he can’t quite decipher; Hermann’s weak smile doesn’t waver.

“Where’d Dr. Geiszler go?” the older, scruffy Newt says. (The beard really does suit him.)

“I think he went to find more junk,” mer-Newt says. “He left an hour ago. What is that?” He’s pointing to Newton’s hand, visible from where he’s clenched it around the corner of the aquarium. At first, Hermann thinks he means Newton’s leather bracelet, or his small skull pinky ring, but he adds “Why are his nails that color?”

“What?” Newton says, eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “Oh,” he holds up his hand, “you mean my nail polish? I painted them like this.”

It’s black, and chipping badly; he usually adds a new coat of varnish every week, but Hermann presumes he’d been so distracted lately he’s forgotten to. “Nail polish,” mer-Newt echoes, eyes wide in curiosity. He looks down at his own nails—sharp, and plain.

Newton turns his attention back to the aquarium, which—the older Newt helping—he starts to shift off the dolly with a great deal of effort. “I have a bunch in the top drawer of my desk,” he grunts. “Go fucking wild.”

Newt’s wide eyes turn to the desk. Endeared by his endless curiosity, his endless stream of questions, Hermann reaches into the top drawer carefully and retrieves a plastic bag of small, multi-colored bottles. Newton has everything from bright pink to clear with foil stars. “Which color would you like?” he says. “I’ve only painted Newton’s once before, so I can’t promise I’ll be any good at it.”

By the time the aquarium is cleaned and properly filled, the Newton they call Dr. Geiszler has wandered back in with an armful of scrap metal and vague claims of having all the parts he needs, and mer-Newt’s nails are an iridescent (if not a little messy) silvery-blue that almost match his tail. He hasn’t stopped waggling his fingers and staring.

“It’s so _ pretty_,” he says.

“Just remember to keep them out of the water until they’re dry,” Hermann says, screwing the lid back on the bottle. “Or you’ll ruin it.” Mer-Newt nods with all the seriousness of if Hermann had tasked him with something of grave importance, and stretches his arms out far above his head. Hermann allows him the smallest hint of a smile. “Very good.”

There’s a scraping noise of metal on metal—a chair being dragged up next to Hermann, right alongside him, in fact. Newt. The Newt Hermann passed yesterday evening with, still wearing Hermann’s sweatpants. He tosses his arms around Hermann in a hug and exclaims, happily, “Hi, Hermann!”

“Good morning,” Hermann says, face going warm. It only goes warmer when Space-Newt presses a kiss to his cheek. “Ah, what are you…?”

Then Space-Newt shoves Newton’s bottle of foil star nail varnish at him. “Will you do mine now?”

* * *

Newt ends up polishing off _ all _ the iced coffees Hermann bought, because he is very tired and deserves it, and some time around five in the evening he tosses his work gloves to the ground, snaps off his goggles, and declares “Right, we’re _ done _for the day.”

Dr. Geiszler does not agree. “Uh, no we’re not.” He waves a fistful of weird plastic tubes at Newt. “We’ve still got a _ lot _of stuff to do, buddy, so—”

“Nah,” Mother Newt says. He yanks his own safety goggles off and rolls down his sleeves. He’s borrowed one of Newt’s sweatshirts for the day, because the shirt he dropped in with started to smell bad even by Newt's standards. “I second that, Newt. I feel like my head’s going to explode if we don’t take a _ break _ or something.” He nods at the other half of the lab, where Hermann, Sexy Newt, and Siren Newt are laughing and talking away. And apparently painting each other’s nails. “Look. Why do they get to have fun while we’re stuck—?”

He doesn’t get to finish: Dr. Geiszler grits his teeth and lets out a long, angry, hiss of breath that has both Newt and Mother Newt furrowing their brows in identical surprise. “Our work here is _ very _ time sensitive,” he says, “if you, you know, somehow didn’t realize, so if we could all just stay on track, that’d be fucking excellent.”

Newt meets Mother Newt’s eyes, and Newt’s pretty sure they’re thinking the same thing. “Pass,” Newt says. “I’m taking a break. A long one. Let’s order a pizza and watch a movie or something.” Or, like, twenty pizzas. Newt’s appetite times five. 

“Fine,” Dr. Geiszler says. Sniffs, really. It’s very Hermann of him. If Newt didn’t believe they got hitched before, he definitely does now. “Break it is.” He drops the plastic tubes to the workbench. “We’re going to have a _ lot _to make up tomorrow.”

“Worth it,” Mother Newt says. 

It’s like a sleepover party. A really weird, sorta-awkward sleepover party, where Newt constitutes almost the entire guest list. It’s really no different than all the failed sleepover parties of his youth, actually, where no one ever showed up but the boy who lived down the hall, and that was just because his mom made him. Hermann has the distinct pleasure of being that odd non-Newt out tonight. Hopefully he won’t skip out after cake.

“I ordered six pizzas,” Newt announces, kicking the lab door open. It’s a struggle to balance all the boxes, plus his tote bag of two six packs (one soda, one beer) around his wrist, and he’s shocked he made it all the way to here from the security gates without any casualties. Everyone’s gotten comfy in his absence: the lab couch is pulled out from the wall and closer to Siren Newt’s tank, Newt and Mother Newt’s pillow-blanket beds repurposed to make a small little nest below it. Hermann is squeezed between Mother Newt and Sexy Newt on it. (Sexy Newt, meanwhile, is wearing some sort of negligee that _definitely _didn't come from anywhere in Newt's closet, but is suspiciously the same color of the pajama bottoms Newt said he could borrow before he left.) “I tried to get something for everyone. There’s seafood, Hawaiian, cheese—”

“Newt can’t eat human food,” Hermann cuts in. “Fish-Newt, I mean. He’ll get sick.”

Newt shrugs. “He can pick off the seafood. You cool with that?”

Siren Newt nods. He seems to be enjoying his new tank—he hasn’t threatened to claw their eyes out again yet, or tried to wriggle down to the beach, so Newt considers that a win. “Fuck yes, pizza,” Mother Newt says. He makes grabby-hands at Newt until Newt—rolling his eyes—carefully frisbees the top box at him. “Hermann _ never _lets me order it anymore.”

“Why would I do that?” Hermann says, frowning. “Or, rather—why do you bother listening?”

“He says it’s important for men _of our age _to watch our health,” Mother Newt says. “He bought some stupid new health cookbook for us.” He says something else, too, but he also chooses that moment to cram an entire folded slice of cheese pizza into his mouth, and it’s lost. (Hermann’s face, meanwhile, plays host to a series of rapidly rotating emotions: confusion, disgust, morbid fascination. Newt hopes it’s because of the pizza and not the implication that he and Newt possibly live together in some version of the future.)

Dr. Geiszler is the only one to turn down the pizza, claiming it won’t fit with his _ diet_—Siren Newt picks shrimp and clam off of his, and even Sexy Newt is excited to engage in more of what he calls “Earth customs.” “I’ve been doing a protein shake cleanse,” Dr. Geiszler explains. He pats his abdomen. “Gotta stay fit.”

“I fucking knew it,” Newt says. _ This _future Newt is just as much of a douchebag as Newt grumpily labelled the other, apparently. A different brand of douchebag. Newt half-wants to ask about the crossfit. Instead, he grabs the last pizza and squeezes himself down on the couch in between Hermann and Sexy Newt so they can’t get up to any more funny business. He didn’t like the way Sexy Newt was looking at Hermann. (Not on his watch.)

“What else do you do at sleepover parties besides this?” Sexy Newt says, completely unbothered by how tightly he’s squashed against the arm of the couch.

“Uh.” Newt thinks back, once more, to his childhood: after birthday cake, when his neighbor would book it out of there, he’d usually make himself a pillow fort, switch on the Discovery channel, and coax his pet iguana into sitting on his shoulder while he played whatever new Gameboy cartridge his dad bought him. “You watch movies,” he says. “And play Truth or Dare.”

“I am _ not _playing that,” Hermann says.

“Sometimes I camp out in my lab with my kaiju,” Mother Newt says, a little smile on his face, “and I build them pillow forts. We could do that.”

“I was thinking pillow fort too,” Newt says, trying very, very hard to not become seethingly envious over the implication of sleepovers with _ baby kaiju_. “I think this counts as one.” He points to the little blanket nest on the ground.

“What’s a movie?” Siren Newt cuts in.

“_Dude_,” Mother Newt says.

Truth or Dare is vetoed in favor of showing Siren Newt what he's missing, so Newt digs his shitty old laptop with, like, forty pirated movies saved to the hard drive out of his desk, and then Mother Newt proceeds to critique and hum skeptically over each one Newt tries to put on. “I forgot this is technically the past,” he finally says. “You’re missing out on a whole decade of good shit, Newt. They even make a movie about _us_.”

“Holy shit,” Newt says, fingers freezing on the trackpad. “They do?”

“Well,” Mother Newt says. “I mean, technically, they combine me and Hermann into one character, but it was still cool. The special effects were great.”

“We had one of those in my universe, too,” Dr. Geiszler calls over. He’s lounging lazily across both Newt and Hermann’s desk chairs, polished shoes kicked up on Hermann’s small bookcase, three empty cans of beer beside him. Guess his cleanse includes booze. “I was invited to the premiere.” He rolls his shoulders back with a small grunt. “It was some sentimental arthouse crap, didn’t even _ show _the kaiju. How lame is that? My actor was hot, though.”

“Was Hermann invited?” Newt says. He feels like that's the sort of thing they'd get a kick out of going to together: Newt would wear the single suit he owns, Hermann would incorrectly tie his bow tie, and they'd spend the night taking full advantage of all the open bars and buffet. It's how they pass most PPDC functions. Anyway, the idea of going to a movie premiere with Hermann just feels glamorous.

But Dr. Geiszler looks at him blankly. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah. We didn't go.”

“Another Hermann,” Hermann marvels quietly. “How strange. I don't know if I'll ever get used to the idea. What am I like in your world, Newton? Or…?”

“Dr. Geiszler,” Dr. Geiszler corrects. He shrugs, not meeting Hermann’s eyes. “Basically the same, I guess. Same old grumpy bastard.”

There's a smear of pizza sauce on Hermann's chin. Newt untucks the handkerchief sticking out from his top pocket and wipes it off for him, then lingers, handkerchief still pressed to his skin. “That’s not the only exciting thing about his world’s Hermann,” he says.

“Hm?” Hermann says.

“You’ll _ never guess_, but we’re—”

Dr. Geiszler coughs loudly. “Come on, Newt, don’t spoil it for him.” 

He says it lightly, but it sounds more like a warning than a tease. Newt tucks the hankie back into Hermann’s pocket. “Fine,” he says. It’s probably not, like, ethical to tell a guy about his hypothetical future unprompted like that, and definitely not for the reasons Newt was planning on. He just wanted to see Hermann squirm.

They dim the lights and put on the movie, a relatively new creature feature Newt’s seen over a dozen times, and Sexy Newt ends up wiggling down to the floor and wedging himself between Hermann’s knees with to watch. More like_ splaying across them_, actually, head pillowed in Hermann's lap. He won’t stop fondling Hermann’s ankles. “The monster’s hot,” he says. “I went on a date with one like it once.”

“It is,” Newt agrees, wistfully.

“Can you see okay?” Mother Newt calls over to Siren Newt.

Siren Newt’s head is poking out over the top of his tank, but his mass of hair—now very wet—is draped over his face and obscuring most of his vision. It's gotta be a pain to carry all that around. “Not really,” he says. 

“One sec,” Mother Newt says. He stands up on the couch. “Tilt your head towards me. Newt, do you have any rubber bands?”

“In my desk, probably,” Newt says. “Why?”

He watches for his answer: Mother Newt has started slowly doing up all of Siren Newt’s curly, wet hair into a messy, but passable, braid. “I went through a phase in my _ very _ early twenties,” he says, eyes narrowed in concentration, “where I made a _ lot _of questionable hair choices.”

“Oh, God,” Newt groans. “Don’t remind me.” He was young, and lonely, and desperate for attention, and the combination led to certain things he’s not proud of. There was pink hair. There was the shittiest DIY faux-hawk ever attempted by man. The mullet. The bleached white mullet. And—

“I used to have it so long I learned to do this for labs,” Mother Newt explains, clambering back onto the couch after finding a rubber band. “My TA had to teach me. There!” 

Newt always thought he looked dumb in braids when he used to have to do them (though they were a better alternative to buns, which, combined with his glasses, tats, ukulele proficiency, and perpetual scruff, fit a very specific niche of mainstream douchebag he wasn’t eager to inhabit), but on Siren Newt it actually looks kind of cute. Especially when he starts swishing it back and forth in delight. “Thanks!” he says. 

None of them end up finishing the movie: Dr. Geiszler has another can of beer, then another, and wanders off to poke around through Newt’s supply closet for a bit before stretching out on his cot (with another beer); Siren Newt slowly drifts to the bottom of his tank, snores coming out as streams of bubbles; Mother Newt nods off against Hermann’s right shoulder, Sexy Newt against Hermann’s knees. By the time it’s just Newt and Hermann left, Newt’s laptop battery finally fizzles out, shuts itself off, and thrusts them into near-darkness. And, you know—it’s actually pretty cozy here, Newt’s starting to realize. Hermann’s sweater is soft. The blanket spread out over their laps is also soft, and warm. He could easily fall asleep here too. 

“I don’t think I can move without waking them,” Hermann whispers.

“Tough,” Newt says. He tucks himself in against Hermann’s left shoulder. He knows he should be angry at Hermann (for the refusal to talk about their night together, for banging a more exciting model of Newt, for everything Dr. Geiszler’s pointed out he does to Newt on the regular), or at least put on a show of being angry at Hermann, but he’s too tired to care about that right now. Right now, he just wants to cuddle with the guy. “Looks like we’re stuck here. Goodnight, Hermann.”

“My back is going to be stiff as a board tomorrow,” Hermann warns him. 

“Ngh. Take Advil.”

“_Newton_,” Hermann says, but he stops protesting and settles in with a huff. And—maybe Newt’s just imagining it, maybe it’s just wishful thinking—he even tucks himself in against Newt a little bit too.

* * *

With their usual work schedule put on hold, and no real need to show up on time at the laboratory for work—after he manages to escape from a pile of Newt and sneak out the next morning, that is—Hermann decides another walk is in order. This one ends deliberately by the Starbucks, where he picks up another iced coffee for Newton in the hopes that this one will do better as the peace offering he intended the last one to be. (Though maybe the last one wasn’t a complete failure. He did wake with Newton’s head pillowed on his chest, after all. Along with his expected stiff back.) As an afterthought, he drops in to another shop and picks up a small variety of sushi to share with the mer-Newt, whom Hermann's grown exceptionally fond of. Human food they can agree on.

Mer-Newt is in his large tank when Hermann arrives, the other Newts hard at work with their strange machine, and he waves Hermann over frantically before Hermann can even greet Newton. “My nails are still silver,” he says. His long braid swishes wildly behind him with each movement. “Look!”

Hermann has to stretch to speak to him—the mouth of the tank is rather high up. “I’m pleased to hear it,” he says. He holds up his bag of sushi. “I thought you might want breakfast. Here—one moment.”

He deposits the sushi onto a small chair pulled up alongside the tank, readjusts his one-handed grip on the coffee, and makes his way over to Newton (where he’s bumping elbows with the two older Newts and the _ very _friendly Newt). He has to clear his throat a few times before Newton snaps off his work goggles and turns around. “I brought you, ah—”

“Cool,” Newton says. He takes it, a little awkwardly. “Uh. Thanks.”

“Hey, Hermann,” Newt cuts in, batting his eyelashes. He’s in Newton’s sweatshirt and _ very _ short denim cutoffs today—he must’ve borrowed a pair of skinny jeans from Newton. “How are _ you _doing?”

“Fine,” Hermann stammers.

He stares just a fraction of a second too long. Newton is not impressed. “Hey, why don’t you go keep Hermann company?” he says, and shoves Newt towards Hermann. “We’re busy.” Goggles back on; coffee set on the workbench. All of the good will they’d managed to regain up in flames again, it seems. “Have any of you guys seen my _ fucking _phone?”

Hermann is hoping Newt doesn’t obey Newton (if not only because he’s not quite sure how to act around a walking innuendo with Newton’s face in a way that’s not horrifically objectifying, especially not after he slept with him), but he trails after Hermann anyway. Eagerly, even. Hermann ignores him at first in favor of mer-Newt, who’s leaning over the edge of the tank and swiping for the brown bag Hermann set down; Hermann pulls out a tray and holds it up so he may reach it more easily. “It’s sushi,” he says. “Rice, and seaweed, and raw fish. It’s good. I thought you might enjoy it.” Two of the three are certainly part of mer-Newt’s diet. It cost Hermann a fair bit—fresh fish is hard to find unpoisoned these days, after all.

“Oh!” Mer-Newt says. He observes a small piece for a few moments and chews on it just as thoughtfully. Then he devours the entire tray. (Hermann’s thankful he bought two.) “I do!”

“Can I have some?” Newt says, poking at the tray still in the bag.

After saving a piece for himself, Hermann divides the remainder between mer-Newt and Newt, the former of whom likes the second roll as much as the first, the latter of whom is skeptical. (“I ate something like this at an intergalactic banquet once,” he says, “but it was made from something a lot different than fish.” “Of course,” Hermann says.) As they eat, Hermann can’t help but notice the rather _ large _ pile of things at the bottom of mer-Newt’s tank: a screwdriver, the bottle of nail varnish Hermann used on him yesterday, and, to his mild horror, something that looks suspiciously like _ Newton’s mobile phone_. “Don’t you think we ought to give those back?” he says, falsely casual, and taps on the glass.

Mer-Newt’s tail fans out in a flash, hiding the phone. “Nah,” he says. “They’re mine. I found them.”

“I’m fairly certain Newton would like his mobile back,” Hermann says. Along with a sandwich bag of rice, if it’s even possible to still salvage it. Oh well—it’s not as if Newton hasn’t lost or destroyed worse before.

“Nah,” mer-Newt repeats. He licks a few stray pieces of fish from his fingertips. “Hey, can we go somewhere? I’m bored.”

Newt brightens up instantly. “Oh!” he says. “Please! Can we? The other guys wouldn’t let me explore. I’ve only seen what you showed me when I got here.”

With good reason, Hermann imagines. Still—he can’t help but feel sorry for them, cooped up in here. He casts a glance to mer-Newt’s wheeled tank. With Newt’s help, he could likely get mer-Newt into it, but as for transport around the Shatterdome...between his leg and his newly sore back... “I don’t know how easily I’ll be able to wheel you around,” he admits. 

“I could do it!” Newt says. 

_ My stamina is impressive_, he told Hermann. He hadn’t lied. Hermann doesn’t doubt he can handle this without a problem, too “Well,” he says. “I suppose it’s just up to Newton.”

Newton doesn’t mind. “Please,” he says. “They’ve gotta be bored out of their fucking minds. I know I’d be. Ha.” He’s not looking up from where he’s slowly screwing a bolt into the side of the machine, and adds, absently, “You’re the best, Hermann.”

A very strange sensation of warmth blooms in Hermann’s chest. “Oh,” he says. “Good. Ah—I’ll be seeing you later.”

* * *

“I kinda Jurassic Park it a little and just design them myself, you know?” Mother Newt says. “Little bit of DNA from here, little bit from there—and they end up looking way cooler, too.” He waves his screwdriver at Newt. “Never underestimate the coolness factor, dude.”

Newt looks up from Mother Newt’s wallet collection of baby kaiju photos (which a closer inspection revealed he even dresses them up for _ Halloween_) to shoot him a grin. The time they’ve spent together here is almost actually enjoyable—despite Mother Newt’s complaints, and his insistence that Dr. Geiszler give them a _ little _ more detail on what they’re making, and Dr. Geiszler’s muttered gripes about being hungover and not being able to concentrate and how they could’ve finished this _ yesterday_. “What kind of DNA?”

“Oh, frog, shark, turtle,” Mother Newt says. “I’m not very picky.” The smile that’d been fixed on his face since he started talking about his pseudo-kids fades suddenly. “A lot of them don’t survive past the fetal stage, anyway, so I really can’t be. But it’s been getting a lot easier. Especially with Hermann helping out.”

Dr. Geiszler shakes his head. “Shit,” he says, and whistles. “You could literally do whatever you wanted with them.”

Mother Newt snorts. “Not with the PPDC on my ass twenty-four-seven. I took one of them out of the base _ one time _ for some fresh air—when they were a few months old, they could fit in a _ baby stroller_—and it was like getting fucking court martialed.”

“Like I said,” Dr. Geiszler says, “you could do whatever you wanted. You really give a fuck about the PPDC’s rules when you could just take your little army, march right up to the door, and…?” He waggles his eyebrows. “All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t exactly be a fair fight, pal. Can you hand me that?”

He points to the screwdriver in Mother Newt’s hand; Mother Newt obliges. Something strange flickers across Mother Newt’s face when their fingers brush, the ghost of a frown, but it’s gone in an instant and Newt can’t help but think he imagined it. “I care about my research,” Mother Newt says, firmly, “and I care about not getting me and Hermann in deep shit for no reason. Besides—they’re not trained for that.”

“Earth’s defense system, you said,” Dr. Geiszler points out.

“_Yeah_, eventually, not—” Mother Newt shrugs. “I don’t know, murdering a bunch of innocent people so I can live like a hermit in a giant cave or something for the rest of my life.” 

Newt watches them argue like he’s at a tennis match; he wonders if this is how people feel around him and Hermann. Probably with a lot more uncomfortable sexual tension. As it is, Newt’s just bored. “I think it’s badass you even made one,” he says. “I considered cloning a kaiju once—just to _ study _ it, you know, I thought it might help.” Newt definitely didn’t harbor fantasies of genetically modifying it so it would never get larger than a housecat but remain strong enough to carry Newt around on its back. “Hermann found out and _ burned _my notes.”

“I know,” Mother Newt says, at the same time Dr. Geiszler says, “I remember.”

“Right,” Newt sighs. “Future.”

* * *

“You helped _ build _ those?” Newt says. He whistles. “Wow. I didn’t think humans were capable of doing stuff like that.” The unspoken sentiment, Hermann realizes, is that _ Newt _is very much capable of building something like that.

It was on Newt’s insistence they toured the parts of the jaeger bay not roped off to j-tech personnel only; he’d poked around the other night, evidently, before causing a bit of a ruckus (and more than a fair bit of damage) and having been escorted out. That being said—mer-Newt seems most impressed of _ all _with the jaegers. (Newt is used to spacecrafts and advanced technology, Hermann reasons. Mer-Newt is assuredly not.) “I did. I helped with the coding, I should say.” Then, because Hermann is allowed the occasional fit of vanity, “They wouldn’t be able to move an inch if it weren’t for me.”

“_Very _impressive,” Newt says. He bats his eyelashes again. “You’re so smart, Hermann.”

Hermann doesn’t even have the time to flush and fluster as he’s grown accustomed to in the face of Newt’s advances, which are _ numerous _ as of their simple walk around the Shatterdome alone—something shiny is disappearing, fast, beneath the water of mer-Newt’s tub. “_Newt_,” Hermann says.

Mer-Newt turns to him guiltily. “Uh, yeah?”

“Give that here.”

Mer-Newt opens his mouth, perhaps to protest, but—after Hermann’s frown deepens—instead unclenches his fingers to show Hermann the small piece of metal pressed against his palm and hands it over. Hermann returns it to the pile it came from a few steps back. It looks largely useless, likely scraps, but he doesn’t feel the risk of the alternative is worth it. “You can’t just take things,” he says, not ungently. “You need to ask first. Do you understand?”

“Sorry,” mer-Newt says, and hangs his head. “I’ve just never seen anything like them before. I like them.”

Hermann considers this. Sitting on a shelf in his bunk is a small box containing a few scraps of the very first model of the very first jaeger he ever coded—one of the only sentimental trinkets Hermann has, really, aside from a short string-bound stack of Newton’s letters, a photograph of his siblings, and a flora field guide with wildflowers pressed between its pages from Hermann’s very brief interest in botany. He thinks he could part with one of the scraps. “I have a piece from one you’re welcome to, if you’d like,” he says. “It’s got a far more interesting past than that piece of rubbish.”

Mer-Newt nods furiously.

“Good,” Hermann says. “Remind me to give it to you later.”

He leads them up to the roof, next. Another testament to his sentimentality—he and Newton used to take smoke breaks up here before they had their latest falling out (or, rather, Hermann would smoke, Newton would chastise him endlessly for it), and occasionally even pop up at night to squint up at what little stars they could see.

At least Hermann intends to take them up to the roof. When he pushes the heavy door open, it’s to see that it’s started raining fairly hard throughout the course of their tour. That’d explain why the pain in Hermann’s back seems to have spread to the rest of his joints—he always aches when it rains. “I didn’t think to bring an umbrella,” he says, apologetically. “I don’t want—”

Mer-Newt glares at the horizon. The rain stops; the storm clouds clear.

“There,” he says.

“_Wow_,” Newt says.

Hermann sways on his feet and catches himself on the metal doorframe. “Did you do that?” he says, faintly, suddenly becoming very aware of just how powerful his two current companions are. In other circumstances, this would make for a _ fascinating _paper.

Mer-Newt flashes him a jagged-sharp grin. “I can do a lot more stuff when I sing,” he says. “Wanna see?”

Before Hermann can assure him that that’s quite unnecessary, thank you, he understands, he’s distracted by the buzz of his mobile phone in his pocket. (He’s pleasantly surprised that mer-Newt hasn’t stolen that, too.) It’s a new email from Newton, with the subject line _Can’t find my fucking phone_. Hermann scans it quickly. “Oh,” he says. “I believe we’ll have to cut our tour short anyway.”

_ Machine’s ready_, Newton’s email says. _ Come back to lab_. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Geiszler's machine is ready to go!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW, sorry this took me so long!!!! i've been mega busy past 2 weeks and spent the weekend on a family trip in the middle of the woods, and i had more stuff i wanted to toss into this chapter and didn't want to rush it, and then it got too long so i had to divide it into TWO chapters, and now we're here
> 
> i hope you all enjoy part one of the conclusion, which is frankly a little silly and melodramatic, and thanks for all the nice comments along the way!!!
> 
> as a disclaimer: most of the Scientific explanations for things i made up is bs'd here, because this is a fic based on a scifi movie, and i don't even remember if we get a proper explanation for most of pru's science so im just taking wild liberties here

“So,” Newt says. “Uh. How does it work?”

Dr. Geiszler smiles at him. “It’s pretty simple, actually,” he says. “Think of it as something like drifting. We interface with it so it can read our origin universe, I switch it on the _ exact _ second the Breach opens tomorrow morning, when the separation between dimensions will already be thin, and it should open more tiny rifts back into our own worlds.”

“Should?” Mother Newt says. He’s leaning against one of Newt’s specimen tanks, arms crossed, forehead creased in understandable skepticism.

“Should,” Dr. Geiszler says, and rolls his eyes. “I can’t_ one-hundred _percent guarantee it’ll work, obviously—but I have a pretty fucking good feeling it will.” He slaps the side of the machine. The computer monitor perched on top—retro, totally 90s, definitely liberated from Hermann’s obscenely large and obscenely unnecessary collection of them—sways dangerously. “I am a rock star, after all.”

Privately, Newt thinks it all just looks like a hunk of junk, but he knows himself, and he knows his ability to make cool things from hunks of junk (because he _ is _ a rock star), so he’s very inclined to give other-himself the benefit of the doubt. Besides. They’ve been standing around passing Dr. Geiszler screws and tools and smaller hunks of junks all day, and all Newt’s sustained himself on is the iced coffee Hermann brought him and a pack of stale saltines he found buried in his desk, so he would really, really like to call it a day. “Pretty good is fine by me,” Newt interrupts. “Can we get food now? I’m _ hungry_.”

They do get food, to Newt’s relief: Mother Newt runs out and grabs them whatever he can carry back from the mess hall, and they sit around and eat in relative silence. Newt would like to say it’s bittersweet and that he’s going to miss them all, especially after the genuinely fun sleepover party, but—between the constant arguing, flirting with (slash banging) Newt’s Hermann, and general inadequacy Newt feels around each and every one of them—he really can’t. He’ll miss Dr. Geiszler, he thinks. Mother Newt, for the rare occasions he _wasn’t _smothering Newt in misplaced worry and vague warnings and talking about his fucking awesome kaiju babies instead. (Siren Newt just kind of scared him.)

“I can’t wait to get back home,” Mother Newt sighs happily over some pasta. “I miss the kids. And Hermann.” He nods at Hermann. “No offense, dude, but you’re about ten years and a parallel universe off from what I need right now.”

“None taken,” Hermann says. “I imagine I’d feel the same were I in your position.”

He sounds amicable as anything, but Newt can’t help but notice the strange look of discomfort behind his eyes, the awkward fumbling of his hands has he stabs a fork into his own dinner. He must’ve figured out the extent of the relationships of half the other Newts and Hermanns by this point, or picked up enough from context clues as Newt has: Mother Newt’s tendency to talk about the young kaiju as _ our kids _ in conjunction with Hermann, the simple wedding ring on a chain around his neck (noticed by Newt only today), Newt’s constant badgering of Dr. Geiszler with questions about Hermann, his own unfinished _ that’s not the only exciting thing about his world _ on the night of the sleepover. He must hate it, Newt thinks glumly to himself. He must be wondering how the _ fuck _he ever got stuck with a guy as annoying as Newt.

“I miss Hermann too,” Siren Newt says, dragging Newt from his self-loathing spiral. “He’s probably worried. I never miss our meetings.”

“Worried sick,” Mother Newt agrees, and his contented smile fades just a little bit. “He wasn’t in the room when I got—” he waves his hand around. “—taken, so he has no clue.”

“Mine was,” Dr. Geiszler says. 

They all turn to him. It’s the first thing he’s said all evening after his declaration about the machine being ready. His nonstop work, refusal to take breaks, and skipped meals seem to have taken a bigger toll on him than Newt realized: he looks completely exhausted. Dark shadows under his eyes. Slump to his shoulders. Even his perfectly arranged hair is mussed up. He looks more like—well, more like _ Newt. _“I miss him,” he continues, in a dull voice. “A lot.”

Newt glances across the room to Hermann, whom he’s surprised to find is already staring at him. They look away from each other quickly.

After that, they have a brief, spirited, but generally unproductive spitballing of ideas as to how they all ended up here in the first place, which they’ve all been so absorbed with figuring out how to _ get them out of here _ they've devoted little to no time to. Mother Newt blames the fuck-up of some other universe’s Newt, who either got himself fried out of existence (which they all turn a little green at the thought of) or ended up in a completely separate dimension in the process; Sexy Newt wonders if it was something he, in all his retro-futurism high-tech glory, screwed up while plodding along merrily through space (maybe an unseen rift in space-time he passed into); Siren Newt seems convinced he angered some sort of sea-deity for his constant fraternizing with humans and vampires alike and was cursed accordingly; Dr. Geiszler thinks it’s pure random chance. “Or maybe it’s some sort of weird, belated kaiju revenge,” he says, in that same exhausted voice as before. “Trap as many as they can in all in the wrong pockets of reality until we fade away to nothing. Hell, maybe they’ve done it to a bunch of Hermanns, too, who knows. Maybe there are ten more of us in _ another _dimension.”

“Maybe there used to be more of us here, and we don’t even remember,” Newt says, finally voicing his earlier, bleak thought, “because they already have. Like that one Twilight Zone episode with the astronauts.”

“Holy shit,” Mother Newt says. “Can you guys lighten up?”

“Sorry.”

“It is all terribly fascinating, though, isn’t it?” Hermann says. “I wish you all didn’t have to leave so soon. The research we could do...” He straightens up, brow already furrowed in thought, eyes lit up in a funny excited way behind his round glasses Newt's come to associate with Hermann talking about space. “Think of the _ papers _ we could write, Newton.”

“I mean, we already knew alternate dimensions existed,” Newt points out. Everyone does. It’s kind of hard to miss it when giant aliens are crawling out of one and razing cities every other day. “We won’t be rocking the scientific world or anything because I suddenly have four clones.”

No one even cares on the _ base _ that Newt suddenly has four clones, except for maybe the handful of techs Sexy Newt’s managed to easily charm, and that’s for reasons completely beyond _ science is cool! _Hermann doesn’t give up that easily. “Four clones with _ very _different realities,” he says, “some even with timelines a decade faster than our own. Don’t you—?”

“Yeah, well,” Dr. Geiszler interrupts. “If we fail tomorrow you’ll have all the time you want for your dorky little experiments, Hermann. Otherwise there’s no use getting all—” He waves his hand. “Worked up about it.”

Hermann flushes, excitement bursting so fast even Newt feels a little guilty. No more is spoken on the subject.

Later, when they've officially called it a night, Hermann insists on joining them for the final laboratory campout so he doesn’t accidentally oversleep goodbyes, and Sexy Newt offers up his cot easily (though not without several innuendo-laden insinuations that Hermann’s _ welcome _to just slip in there right alongside him). They set an alarm on Hermann’s phone, since Newt’s has apparently vanished into thin air. They say goodnight. Newt falls asleep the instant his head hits his lumpy spare pillow. That’s that.

At least it should be just that. Newt falls asleep the instant his head hits his lumpy spare pillow, but the lab is still pitch-black when he's shaken awake what feels like only a handful of minutes later. Aggressively shaken awake. A lot more aggressively than he thinks is strictly necessary. “‘M up,” he groans, miserably, into the crease of his elbow. He probably overslept, and Hermann is exacting petty reverse-revenge on him for not waking him up for work as he asked the other morning. “What time is it?”

“Shh,” another him hisses back. Newt fumbles around for his glasses for a few seconds before they’re shoved into his hands.

“Thanks,” he says. He slips them on.

It’s Dr. Geiszler, stripped down to his too-fancy button-up, wrinkled after days of unwash and constant wear, smile fixed on his face. “I found booze in Hermann’s bedroom,” he says. He waves a bottle of whiskey. “Wanna split it?”

“You went in Hermann’s bedroom?” Newt says, groggily, but Dr. Geiszler pulls him to his feet by the front of his sweatshirt and doesn’t answer.

* * *

The loud metallic click of the lab door shutting is what wakes Hermann up and makes him blink around, sleepily, at his surroundings; a familiar, eager face inches from his own is what_ keeps _him up. “Newton!” he yelps. He sits up, scrambling to pull the bedcovers over his thin undershirt to protect some sort of modesty, while Newton doesn’t so much as flinch. If anything, he's amused by it. “What—?”

“Not _ Newton_,” Newton says. He lifts himself up onto Hermann’s cot to sit at his feet, hand grazing Hermann’s ankle coyly, and Hermann spies the too-short too-tight sweatpants and the crop top that _ used _to be Hermann's before certain unexplained alterations. The tattoos that aren’t quite right. The strange, almost ancient, glitter of his eyes. Not Newton indeed.

“Newt,” Hermann corrects. He sags in relief, and in the following second supposes he should feel guilty for it—he’s certain Newton (his Newton) is still irritated with him for his dalliance with the space-Newt, and Hermann wants more than anything to make amends, but that doesn’t mean he wants to talk about it in the middle of the night. Newton has a mild tendency to shriek and stir up a fuss when he’s upset. “What are you doing?”

Newt smiles. He inches closer. “I just wanted to say,” he whispers, too loud, “I’m going to miss you when I go home tomorrow. A whole lot.”

“Ah,” Hermann stammers. “How kind of you.”

Newt’s touch moves from Hermann’s ankle to his knee, noticeably hot even through the thick layer of his cotton pajama trousers, and Hermann’s heart begins to race. (He remembers his earlier assessment of this Newt being designed and thrust into his reality for the explicit purpose of driving Hermann up the wall: it remains, he realizes, uncomfortably accurate.) “Do you want to have sex again before I go?” Newt says. He tugs open the drawstrings of the tight sweatpants. “You were good at it, and I had fun. We could—”

“Newt,” Hermann says. “Ah. No. I’m sorry.” He swallows a few times. “I believe I may have—unintentionally hurt Newton’s feelings, that last time.” Or perhaps it was intentional. (_Hermann _ was angry with Newt too, after all, for pretending their night together never happened. It seemed a good way to get back at him at the time.) “It wouldn’t be right to him.”

To his surprise, Newt seems almost pleased by the rejection. “That’s fine!” he says. He re-ties the strings and drops his hands from his waistband. “I’m glad you’re thinking of him.”

“...Yes?” Hermann agrees.

Newt doesn’t move. “Do you want to have sex with him again?”

Hermann chokes on air; he looks, frantically, to where Newton has been curled up on the ground all night. His pillow and blanket lay there in a heap. Distinctly without a Newton to use them. The door shutting must’ve been him leaving—which means, _ blessedly_, he didn’t hear that. Hermann shushes Newt anyway. “Keep your blasted voice down.”

“Do you?” Newt says.

Finding no other way to deter him, Hermann finally relents. “I care about him,” he says.

“And you think he’s hot, and you want to have sex with him,” Newt says. “It’s okay to want things, Hermann. From what I know about humans—” He bats his eyelashes. “—sex is _ perfectly _ natural to want.”

“I don’t _ just _want to have sex with him,” Hermann snaps, and then blushes in mortification. He clears his throat; he levels his voice. “I do, but. That isn’t the only thing I’d like to do.” Newt stares. Hermann sighs. “What I mean is that I care for Newton in ways beyond merely—physical.”

To Hermann’s further surprise, Newt reaches over and squeezes his hands. Companionably, even. Not a hint of seduction. “There you have it!” Newt says. “You should tell your Newt that. I think he’d probably like to hear it.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. He also thinks Newton would probably like to hear it.

Newt kisses his cheek and slips back to the floor. The hem of his crop top flutters up, enough to give Hermann a tantalizing glimpse of his soft, tattooed abdomen and the strong pecs above it. Hermann drags his eyes away. “I really am gonna miss you,” Newt says. “Maybe I should look for the Hermann in _ my _universe.”

“I believe he would appreciate that a great deal,” Hermann says, and allows Newt a small smile.

* * *

Dr. Geiszler has dug two dingy tin mugs out of somewhere, probably swiped from the mess hall, and he fills one up half of the way with whiskey and passes it to Newt. He’s led them up to the roof, the same spot they sat the other day when they talked about drifting with the kaiju brain. It feels like a lifetime ago. “Why are we up here?” Newt says. He squints at the horizon. It’s an abnormally chilly night, breezy, hint of rain in the overcast sky, and the spray of sea salt from below isn’t helping. He wishes he knew they were coming up here ahead of time—he would’ve brought a blanket or at least put some damn pants on over his boxers_. _“‘S nowhere near sunrise. Can I go back to bed?”

“I wanna have a drink with you,” Dr. Geiszler says. “A grand send off. It’s my last night here. Humor me, dude, please?”

Newt _hm_s, but takes the mug. He already feels bad knowing that Dr. Geiszler apparently broke into Hermann’s quarters, but he feels worse once he actually takes a sip of the whiskey: it’s decent quality. Nothing like what they have along coastal cities these days. Someone must’ve sent this to Hermann from out of the country, a family member, maybe, probably as a gift. The bottle looks like it’s barely been touched. “Cheers, Newt,” Dr. Geiszler is saying. He clicks their mugs together with a grin.

“Uh,” Newt says. “Yeah.”

He swallows down the lump in his throat and drinks a little more. So does Dr. Geiszler.

“Drifting with that kaiju brain is going to be the best fucking moment of your life,” Dr. Geiszler says, gazing, a bit wistfully, out at the churning of the iron-grey sea. “It’s like—seeing _ a million things _at once. It’s like you’re a completely different person. You’re not gonna want to stop. You—”

“I think I’m going to tell Hermann about it first,” Newt blurts out.

Dr. Geiszler snaps to face him. Any trace of wistfulness, of humor, is gone. His face is as cold and rigid as stone. “What?”

“I think I’m going to tell Hermann,” Newt says. “It’s just—” He sets his mug down. “I tell Hermann everything. He’s my friend. If I’m doing something as stupid as this, I want _ someone _to be there in case I fuck it up.”

“But you don’t,” Dr. Geiszler says. “You _ don’t _ fuck it up, dude. The other one and I prove it. You—”

“Look, I’m telling Hermann first, and that’s it,” Newt says. “I just feel more comfortable that way.” He drains the rest of his drink. “You’re _ married _to him. Don’t you kinda understand how I feel?”

Dr. Geiszler works his jaw. For a second—a weird, fleeting second—Newt thinks that he might grab Newt by the shoulders and shake him, yell at him, maybe, tell him how _ wrong _he is. For an even weirder second, Newt wonders if he might shove him off the side and over the railing. But he doesn’t. He stays as cool and collected as ever. “Alright, then,” is all he says. “Go ahead. Tell Hermann.” He snatches Newt’s mug up. “One last toast to your luck?”

“Fine,” Newt says, “and then I’d, uh, like to go back to bed, if that’s fine.” He scuffs his boot against the cement of the roof. “Busy morning tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Dr. Geiszler agrees. “Busy morning.”

He pours Newt another drink while Newt gazes up at the sky. Now that the population is dwindling (and Newt is _ not _an asshole, he just means because people have moved away, thanks, not because they’ve been stomped on or turned into kaiju chow or whatever), the light pollution is markedly better, and usually he can actually see some stars. “Hermann and I used to come up here a lot,” he says. “You probably remember that though.” The mug nudges against his hand; he takes it. “Thanks.”

“Gotta say,” Dr. Geiszler says, once Newt has taken a sip, “I’m a little disappointed in you, Newt. I thought you’d understand.”

Newt frowns, and swallows around another lump in his throat. Not a lump—this feels different. “Understand what?”

“I thought we could be a _ team _tomorrow morning,” Dr. Geiszler says. “I thought you were different from the rest of—well, us. A different Newt. Obviously I was wrong.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Newt says, or, at least, he tries to say it. His tongue feels like it’s fallen asleep, and it’s hard to open his mouth; his throat is getting tighter by the second; his limbs feel heavy.

Did Dr. Geiszler _ poison _him?

“It’s a sedative,” Dr. Geiszler says, “so you can calm down. You’ll be unconscious in a few minutes anyway.” He dumps out the contents of Newt’s mug to the roof; mixed in with the whiskey, Newt can see small clumps of white powder. (Taking drinks from strangers. Way to fucking go, dumbass.) “I just wanted to make you a little more agreeable.”

“Fuck you,” Newt tries to say. He gives a feeble kick, and the toe of his boot barely even grazes one of Dr. Geiszler’s fancy leather brogues. “You fucking dick, holy shit, you suck.”

Something flickers behind Dr. Geiszler's eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds oddly like he means it. The exhaustion from earlier has returned to line his features, along with something else—something that almost looks like fear. “I didn’t want to, Newt. I had to. I didn’t want...” He trails off.

Newt’s eyelids are getting heavy, too, as heavy as his arms, as heavy as his legs. The last thing he sees, before he’s consumed by swirling black, is Dr. Geiszler's strange, fearful looming above him.

* * *

And then the first thing he sees when he wakes up is Hermann. It’s a nice improvement. It would be nicer, you know, if his arms weren’t tied behind his back, if he wasn’t lying on his stomach on the filthy floor of the lab, and if there wasn’t a cloth gag in Hermann’s mouth. “Howdy, partner,” Newt slurs, and Hermann startles to life at once, “you come here often?”

Hermann shouts around the cloth. Whatever he says, it doesn’t sound family friendly.

“Ngh,” Newt agrees. His head is throbbing. He tries to wiggle his feet, maybe to stand, maybe to try to find something to cut the wrist ropes with (like he’s in a movie), but, no surprise, those are bound, too. He slumps forward with a huff. “Well, this blows.”

“Newt?” another Newt calls anxiously. With some effort, Newt manages to maneuver onto his side to see which one—it’s Mother Newt. Likewise bound. He, at least, gets the couch.

“Hiya,” Newt says. Sexy Newt is bound up next to Mother Newt and looking remarkably blase about it all, like this is a weekly occurrence for him. (It probably is.) His bindings have also taken on a distinctly shibari style that Newt’s pretty sure aren’t the work of Dr. Geiszler. Siren Newt is nowhere in sight. “How come Hermann is the only one with—?” Forgetting about his bonds, Newt tries to gesture towards his mouth. At least Mother Newt seems to understand.

“Kept bitching,” he says. “Dr. Geiszler did _ not _like that. By the way—I told you so.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Newt says. “What the fuck is he planning on doing to us, anyway?”

“Beats me,” Mother Newt says. 

Newt wonders if he could roll over to his workbench and kick at it until his scalpel falls to the ground. He does run the risk of accidentally stabbing himself with it in the process, of course, but his wrists are really starting to hurt, and a stab wound might be a fucking improvement. Spice it up a little. “At least now,” he starts scootching towards the bench, inch by inch, unable to not make wisecracks even now, “I know for sure I’m not into bondage.”

“Ha,” Mother Newt says. “Can you reach it?”

Newt will never understand just how easily these guys can read his thought process. He knows they’re the same person, but it’s still creepy. “If I wiggle a little more,” he says, “I might—”

Dr. Geiszler’s fancy brogues come into view right in front of Newt. “You might what?” he says, and then he kicks Newt in the face.

Newt’s second slip into unconsciousness that morning is moderately more painful than the last. When he wakes up, his nose is throbbing right alongside his head, and there’s a significant amount of blood on his shirt. He’s also being dragged across the floor by his hair. “I’m sorry,” Dr. Geiszler says, imploringly, “you gotta understand, I don’t _ want _ to do this. They—”

He startles abruptly into silence, like someone’s slapped him across the face, and his hand slips from Newt's hair. There’s the sound of his footsteps tapping away; then, the machine he made the previous night rolling into view. There are helmets attached to it. Enough for each of them. Even Hermann. Newt lifts his head as much as he can manage. “You’re zapping us to another dimension?”

“Not exactly,” Dr. Geiszler says. He crouches down next to Newt and grips his jaw, holding him fast in place. “Stay still, please.”

“No,” Mother Newt says, “_no_, do me, not him. Don’t—”

“Would you believe we ended up here by total accident?” Dr. Geiszler cuts across him loudly. “One second, we’re re-opening the Breach, the next—” He shrugs, and stands up. “We must’ve fucked up the calculations _ real _bad. Gottlieb would’ve done it better. If he’s good for anything, it’s numbers.”

One of the helmets is strapped onto Newt’s head. It feels funny. Kinda heavy. Over Dr. Geiszler’s shoulder, Mother Newt’s face contorts with something that might be _ horror _ when Dr. Geiszler plugs the end of a long cord (trailing from the machine) into the glass tank Newt is pressed up against. “We got lucky, though,” Dr. Geiszler continues. “Here we were thinking we’d just be floating around in the fucking void until Geiszler’s miserable little body gave out, but we woke up _ here_. The Breach must’ve dragged you in with us. It’ll be hard to fuck up with five of you—plus a brand new Dr. Gottlieb, of course.” He shoots Hermann a sarcastic little wave, and an equally sarcastic parody of a smile. “Hey, honey.”

Newt’s having a hard time keeping his eyes open, a hard time staying upright; belatedly, he realizes one of the lenses of his glasses has completely shattered. He watches Dr. Geiszler strap down another helmet on his own head, then pick up a small remote with a switch. “What…?” he slurs. “What are you talking about?”

Dr. Geiszler reaches for the switch, but his hand stills. His grin fades away. His fingers twitch around the remote, almost enough to drop it entirely. “Please don’t make me,” he says. “Hermann—”

“_What_?” Newt repeats.

The fluorescent lights in the lab turn red, and flashing: the kaiju alert alarm begins to wail. Activity in the Breach. Just as Hermann predicted.

Almost on cue, Dr. Geiszler flips the switch.

He wasn’t lying about drifting with the kaiju brain, at least. It _is _ like being a different person. Several different people. Hundreds. Thousands. It’s like Newt’s drowning in a thousand different voices. Newt is himself at 34, he is himself as 12, and he is himself at 45 with a hand wrapped around Hermann’s throat (I’m ending the world, he says), and he is the entire kaiju hivemind, he’s something old and ancient, (and he’s a bit of _ Hermann _ too, somehow) and it hurts, it’s like his brain is on _ fire. _

He’s gasping when he reemerges. Mother Newt is shouting. Dr. Geiszler grips his jaw again and forces his head up. “See?” he says. “Don’t you understand?”

It takes a few minutes for Newt to coax his tongue back into his mouth, to coax his eyes open. There’s a ringing in his ears. He thinks his nose is bleeding. He understands very well, in fact—that Dr. Geiszler’s been lying all this time, manipulating him. That he's not even a Newt Geiszleranymore. Not that Newt can form the words to say any of it.

(Newt saw everything.)

“You don’t need people like Hermann,” Dr. Geiszler says. “They only hold you back. They treat you like an insignificant waste of space, like a _joke_—”

Newt’s head lolls; he can’t keep his eyes from drifting shut again. Dr. Geiszler drops him. “He won’t love you like this, Newt,” he says. He sounds very far off. “He never could. He wants someone impressive, remember?”

The helmet is ripped from Newt’s head. Someone else is tossed down next to him. Geiszler says something, but he sounds twice as far away as before—twice as muffled—like someone’s forced Newt’s head underwater. More shouting. The loud thud of something clattering to the floor.

A hand is at Newt’s cheek—not Dr. Geiszler’s rough touch (identical to Newt's—calloused from his guitar and labwork), but gentle. “Newton,” someone says. There’s a small pat. Hermann’s hand. Hermann’s voice. Hermann. “Newton—”

Newt opens his eyes.

Hermann is kneeling in front of him, white-faced, brows knit together. Behind him is Mother Newt, tying up an unconscious and collapsed Dr. Geiszler. To Newt’s left is Sexy Newt, rope bindings slipped to his side, helmet strapped to his head, smiling happily away at them all. Then Hermann is hurtling himself at Newt in a hug. “Are you—” Hermann stammers, “are you hurt, Newton, are you—?”

“Help me with him!” Mother Newt says, and Sexy Newt stands up (with a little groan and a stretch), pushes his helmet off, and hurries to pin Dr. Geiszler down.

“Newton!” Hermann repeats.

“Yeah,” Newt says. To his surprise, that just makes Hermann cling to him tighter, one hand going and cupping the back of Newt’s head, his face pressing tight to Newt’s neck. “I’m alive. I’m alive. What the fuck happened, dude?”

What happened was this: after Dr. Geiszler finished with Newt (leaving him prone and out of his fucking mind) he moved on to Sexy Newt, and promptly collapsed a split second after he initiated the drift. Sexy Newt, on the other hand, remained perfectly fine. Mother Newt—who’d been working away at his own binds the whole time—was able to jump into action almost immediately.

“I think my brain was too much for him,” Sexy Newt says. He laughs and taps the side of his head. On the floor, Dr. Geiszler groans. “Too _ alien_.”

“Rope,” Mother Newt says, snapping his fingers at Sexy Newt. “C’mon.”

“Are you certain you’re alright?” Hermann murmurs, brushing back Newt’s hair. “You were seizing, and making all sorts of awful noises—it was—I was _ frightened_, Newton.”

“Peachy-keen,” Newt says, weakly. “Never felt better.”

Hermann chews at his lower lip. His thumb strokes, idly, at the dip in Newt’s chin beneath Newt’s mouth. When he speaks, his voice is low. Gentle. “What he said to you—”

“He’s definitely not alright,” Mother Newt interrupts, “and we definitely need to fix that now, or we won’t be able to at all.” The same helmet as before is tossed into Newt’s lap. “Put it on. Now. And unplug that fucking thing, will you?”

He’s pointing at the glass tank behind Newt. The kaiju brain. (Newt doesn’t even have _ time _ to reflect on all the bonkers shit he saw in there, but he is very pleased to know that his kaiju-are-clones theory was utterly, 100% _ correct_, baby, suck on that.) Newt hurriedly shoves the helmet back on his head; Hermann scrambles closer and gives the thick cord snaking to it from the cannibalized drift tech a great tug. It pops off.

“Perfect,” Mother Newt says. He pulls the helmet off Dr. Geiszler’s head and sticks it on his own, then picks up the discarded remote. “Okay. You gotta trust me on this one, Newt.”

“Yeah,” Newt says, still pretty out of it. “Sure.”

Entering the drift the second time, sans a fucking kaiju brain, is mildly less painful. It’s not any less disconcerting. He doesn’t see his own hands around Hermann’s throat, or thousands of beady, insectoid alien eyes—he sees a kaiju the size of a cat in his arms, he sees Hermann in pajamas smiling at him across a table. He sees the kaiju hivemind again, but it’s different than the last time. It's not colored by fear. Newt has the oddest feeling they _ trust _him.

Hermann is clinging to him when he jerks out of it. “What did you _ do_?” Hermann half-shouts at Mother Newt. “His brain’s been through bloody enough already—”

“Repaired whatever damage _Dr. Geiszler_did,” Mother Newt says. He unstraps his helmet. “I don’t think he’s us, anymore. I think… Well.” He sits down on the couch heavily and starts tapping his fingers against his knee. “When I drifted with a kaiju brain ten years ago, it gave me a mental link with the kaiju that lingered even after we blew up the Breach. That’s how I was able to breed them—how it was easy to drift with them, after that, so they’d trust me. I think he—” He levels a kick at Dr. Geiszler’s fancy suit leg. “—had a lingering link with—”

“Precursors,” Newt says, the name bad-tasting and foreign on his tongue. That’s what they are: the things that created the kaiju, forced them to carry out their dirty work. The things that forced Dr. Geiszlerto carry out their dirty work, too. “I saw. In there.”

Newt’s hand—Dr. Geiszler’s hand—had been around Hermann’s neck when everything turned blue and upside down. He had also been crying. A tiny bit of fight left in him, maybe. “He was getting stronger,” Newt says, faintly, like he’s recalling the details of a fast-fading dream. “Newt.” The long second of hesitation before Dr. Geiszler flipped the switch. The terrified look in his eyes. _ I don’t want to_, he told Newt. They couldn’t make him drift with a kaiju brain—the one Dr. Geiszler keeps hidden in the back of his too-swank and too-pristine Shanghai apartment, permeated with a cold loneliness palpable to Newt even through a secondhand memory—while he was here, and then there was _ Hermann_, the Hermann they’d kept him apart from for a fucking decade, the only one they were really afraid of, here in front of him, and their control was almost starting to slip. _ Almost_.

Their drift just then probably put a stop to that.

“It’s my fault he even—” Mother Newt drags his hand through his hair with a sigh. “I could feel the infection in him. I just assumed he was like me, that he had a lingering connection with the hivemind, and that’s what I was sensing.”

“Infection?” Hermann echoes. “He drifted with Newton. Newton’s not—?”

His fingers brush Newt’s temple, and panic spikes in the pit of Newt’s stomach. He’d know, wouldn’t he, if the Precursors decided to hop into his mind too? He’d be able to feel them? “I overpowered it when we drifted,” Mother Newt assures them both. “I’m sure of it. _ Shit_.” 

Dr. Geiszler gives another feeble groan and twitches where he lies on the floor. The sight makes Newt’s heart twinge pathetically. Ten years—trapped in his own mind—kept apart from Hermann—he knows the guy tried to bring him to the darkside, or whatever, but it’s still _ Newt_, and he still feels bad for him. Judging by Hermann’s small, barely audible noise of distress, he feels similarly. Mother Newt does not: he narrows his eyes, works his jaw a few times, then sets it, stony and rigid. “Go get the Siren,” he says to Sexy Newt. “We’re gonna need all of us. And the extra helmets.”

“Extra helmets?” Newt says. He tries to sit up, but Hermann pushes him back down.

“Don’t exert yourself,” he says, gently, and pulls off the helmet to stroke his hair back again. His hand is trembling. The corner of his mouth is, too. (_Holy shit_, Newt wants to say, _ lighten up_, he’s not on his fucking deathbed or anything, it’s just that his brain feels like it’s been sauteed until brown with some onions, but Hermann’s so earnest in his worry and Newt's so desperate for the touch that he can’t bring himself to do anything but melt against him.) “You’ve had a rough go of it. Just—just try to relax, Newton.”

Newt reaches up and covers that shaking hand with his own. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve been an asshole _ and _a dumbass. I should’ve known—”

“No,” Hermann says, voice cracking. There’s a gash above his eyebrow, probably as a result of Dr. Geiszler hustling them all over for brainwashing. “It’s me who should be—”

“It’s neither of you,” Mother Newt says, wheeling a furious-looking Siren Newt over back in his little tub. “It’s what’s in Dr. Geiszler’s head. Helmet back on, Newt.”

Hermann lets Newt sit up this time. As Newt slips the helmet back on for what feels like the millionth time today, Sexy Newt and Mother Newt lift Siren Newt from his tub and place him gently on the floor. “He locked me in the _ closet_,” Siren Newt spits. He dodges the helmet when Mother Newt tries to place it on his wild mane of hair. “What’s that? What are you doing?”

“It’s not gonna hurt you, dude,” Mother Newt says. “I promise. It’ll just feel a little weird.”

Sexy Newt has already strapped his on again. “Yeah,” he says, “Last time was fun!”

Siren Newt eyes him, skeptically, before finally ducking and allowing Mother Newt to do his; Hermann (hands still trembling) carefully does up Dr. Geiszler’s, after a nod from Mother Newt; then, one by one, Mother Newt plugs each into the black machine. Hermann regards it all with wide eyes. “Can’t I…?” he begins.

“Newts only,” Mother Newt says. He smiles. “But you can turn it on.”

Hermann turns his wide eyes to Newt, and Newt gives an uncomfortable shrug. Truth be told, he’d _way _prefer to have Hermann along for the ride. It’d be a hell of a lot less terrifying diving back into whatever Dr. Geiszler’s mind is with Hermann by his side. (Besides: he’s always harbored a bit of a romantic fantasy of being drift compatible with Hermann.) “What he said,” he says. “Sorry, dude.” He reaches out and takes Hermann’s hand, then gives it a brief squeeze. “Be back in a jiffy.”

Dr. Geiszler begins to stir. Mother Newt nods at Hermann. “Now,” he says.

Drifting is no less disorienting the third time Newt does it. He sees the baby kaiju in his arms, Hermann smiling across the table, his hands clenched tight around Hermann’s throat, plugging himself into the kaiju brain over and over again—Mother Newt and Dr. Geiszler. There’s the _ alien _of Sexy Newt’s brain that’d proved too much for Dr. Geiszler—the inky void of space, monsters and neon plants and purple skies, a life that stretches on far too long to be natural. Siren Newt’s strange flashes of thought—of fish, and shiny odds and ends stashed away, the too-sharp glint of a pale, pale Hermann’s smile. 

But beneath it all, even beneath whatever’s taken control of Dr. Geiszler (screaming and hissing at them to _ stop, leave, he’s ours_), is something very _Newt_. So Newt clings to it—to his curiosity, his hyperactivity, his loud mouth, his righteous fucking habit of throwing himself into the jaws of death for _ science_—and he pulls. He feels the other Newts latch on and pull, too.

They all jerk out of it together: Mother Newt and Sexy Newt calm as anything, Siren Newt terrified, Newt with what feels like yet another nosebleed. (He’s going to need a goddamn blood transfusion by noon.) Dr. Geiszler remains prone and senseless at their feet; his mouth is hanging open. “Did it work?” Hermann says. He's clutching the remote like a lifeline. “Did it—?”

Dr. Geiszler shoots up, gasping and seizing as Newt had after his first drift.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt-Ex-Machina.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE FINAL BULK OF PLOT EXCITEMENT.....ive been referring to this as "newt ex machina" in my head this whole time, but "astronewt ex machina" is more accurate. he lives by his own rules of reality
> 
> again, thank you all for your nice comments and interest in the fic, and thank you ferio for making such FUN alt universe newts!!! i will tack on a brief epilogue (in which we visit each alt universe newt's universe for proper closure, and newt and hermann officially deal with their feelings) some time in the next day or so :)

They manage to calm Dr. Geiszler down enough once his seizing stops that his indistinct shouts morph into something significantly more distinct, namely, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and “they made me do it,” on repeat, though Newt, frankly, does not find it any less distressing to listen to, nor does he find Dr. Geiszler’s sheer pale-faced and stomach-churning terror any easier to witness. The Precursors really did a number on him.

He calms down when Mother Newt settles a hand against the small of his back and says, gently, “Easy, dude. We know. It’s not your fault. Calm down.”

Dr. Geiszler sags into the touch. His eyes are welling up with tears. (Newt feels Hermann twitch incrementally towards him: he can’t resist his deep-seated instincts to comfort Newt at the first sign of distress, apparently, which Newt finds simultaneously sad and sweet.) “I was so tired,” he says.

**** They only untie Dr. Geiszler’s hands long enough to allow him to slip into one of Newt’s old sweatshirts—as much as they _ want _ to completely trust him, and as much as Mother Newt assured them he can’t detect anything like the hivemind in him anymore, Newt and Mother Newt silently, mutually agree that would be incredibly stupid for now—but settle him down on the lab couch with a blanket around his shoulder and ply him with coffee and the remainder of Newt’s stash of stale crackers. He eats like he hasn’t had a proper meal in years. He _talks _like he hasn’t seen another human being in years, either, once the shock wears off. Maybe he hasn’t. It’s convenient, anyway—Newt thought they were going to have to have to pressure him for details on the Precursors’ control, that it’d be too painful to relive, but Dr. Geiszler can’t seem to spill them fast enough.

Newt understands. If that were him—if he’d been bottled up in his own mind for a decade—he doesn’t think he’d ever shut the fuck up again, if not just for the reassurance that he has the _ choice _not to.

Dr. Geiszler talks about how it started (that tiny voice in the back of his brain, whispering, feeding into his self-loathing, his self-doubts, his paranoia—he’s a fake, he’s pathetic, Hermann’s too good for a guy like him), how it progressed (the unexplainable, unsquashable, burning need to hook himself up to the kaiju brain _ one last time_, then again, then again, then the isolation, the ten years spent alone and drowning his sorrows any chance he got), and how it ended (drones, kaiju clones, the Breach ripped back open, Hermann’s trembling neck beneath his trembling fingers, the alarm bells of something gone wrong and Hermann dropping to the floor). “And then I was here,” he finishes. He shoves more crackers into his mouth. “Probably got a tiny decimal point wrong in the equation. Or got it _ right_, I guess. I’m glad I didn’t just get fried or something when it blew up in my face.” Mother Newt offers him another sip of instant coffee, and he groans with delight. “_Fuck_, dude, I haven’t had coffee this shitty in years. I missed it. Can’t stand that gourmet bougie crap they made me get. Like, they’re _ aliens_, how can they even _ tell _there’s a difference?”

Newt ignores this and inches his chair closer. “You were coming back to yourself,” he says. “I saw, when we—” He wiggles his fingers between their heads.

“A little,” Dr. Geiszler agrees. He flashes Hermann a timid smile, and Hermann returns it, a little taken aback. “Seeing you again helped. It helped back in my world, too, with my Hermann.” The smile fades. “My Hermann. Fuck. I’ve done a lot of bad stuff, man. A _ lot_. I don’t know if he’ll even—”

“We’ll get you back to him,” Mother Newt says firmly. “It wasn’t you doing it. He’ll understand.”

“I was hurting him,” Dr. Geiszler says. He stares down at his lap, at his bound hands, and flexes his fingers. “He probably—”

“We’ll get you back,” Newt repeats loudly. It’s pretty impassioned. Enough that he almost believes it himself. He ruins it the following second when he ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck. “Uh. Somehow. Not really sure where to start here. How long did it take you to open the Breach back…?”

“Ten years,” Dr. Geiszler says.

“‘Course,” Newt says.

They missed the kaiju attack at dawn—which their superiors are no doubt pissed about, and Newt imagines they’ll be summoned for a disciplinary meeting before nightfall, but he can’t see why it _ matters _ when all they really do is shake their heads and _ hm _ over the action going down on the big screens anyway, and they were a _ little _tied up—which means they also missed their window of opportunity to, like, shoot everyone off into the Breach with a cannon or something for at least another few months, so Newt’s fresh out of ideas for how to proceed. This kind of science is light years beyond what they’re currently capable of. Even with some not-so-friendly extraterrestrial assistance, it took a decade, and by that point who knows what the alternate timelines will look like. If the other Newts even make it that long without poofing from existence. Scientific classification, Newt thinks: a real grade-A pickle. “Well,” he says, “unless one of you guys has been hiding a goddamn TARDIS in your back pocket this whole time, I think we’re pretty well and screwed.”

“Oh,” Sexy Newt says, “what about this?”

He holds out what appears to be a large box, produced from seemingly nowhere. It’d be unremarkable if it wasn’t for the color—hazy and shifting and glittering like no color Newt’s ever seen before, like someone chipped off a small chunk of space and walled it up in glass. His eyes sting if he looks at it for too long. “I use it when I need to somewhere in a hurry,” Sexy Newt says. “It was gifted to me after I—”

“In a hurry?” Newt interrupts, not particularly wanting to hear about another sexy escapade involving how the guy brought about world peace with a spaceship orgy or something.

Sexy Newt nods, smiling benignly. He holds the box up higher and gestures to a small button on top below a dial. “I just input where I want to go, and it opens up a small portal. It’s a little busted, though, so it sometimes takes a few tries to get it right. I’ve used it for small interdimensional trips before. There’s a _ sick _bar a jump over, they serve the most amazing space martinis.”

“You didn’t think to tell us about that until _ now_?” Mother Newt shrieks.

“What’s a space martini?” Dr. Geiszler says.

“Where on Earth were you keeping that?” Hermann says, squinting at the tiny negligee Sexy Newt’s yet to have time to change out of.

“Actually, yeah,” Newt says, “that’s a good question.”

Sexy Newt blinks at them. “I mean,” he says to Mother Newt, ignoring the rest of them, “you didn’t ask. And you wouldn’t let me help. Anyway, I _ said _ it’s kinda busted. It got damaged when I crash-landed—come on, can’t I finish, like, one story?”

He doesn’t finish that one either. Mother Newt immediately snatches the iridescent box from him and begins fiddling with the dial. “What do all these things mean?”

“Different universe designations,” Sexy Newt says. He takes it back and rotates the dial until one long, jumbled string of numbers and letters appears on a small digital screen above the button. “This one is mine. It’s not too hard to figure out where you need to go. Just sort of—wiggle it a little. That always works for me!” He hands it back to Mother Newt. 

“‘Not too hard’,” Hermann scoffs, and then sniffs; Newt swallows down a groan. He’d be able to sense the onset of one of Hermann’s stuffy lecture modes a mile away. A universe away. “_Presuming _ that your contraption even remotely does what you say it does, the odds of singling out four _ specific _ different universes—let alone _ one_—out of an infinite number are _ astronomically _slim. We could spend the rest of our bloody lifespans trying and not even—”

A small sparking purple circle of light erupts from the box, which Mother Newt—shocked—drops to the ground with a metallic clatter. The circle balloons out. They’re looking into— “Holy shit,” Mother Newt says. He jumps to his feet. “That’s my kitchen.”

It does look like the sort of kitchen Newt would, conceivably, have at one point in the future, he’ll admit. The walls are green. Papers and half-open books are stacked over every available surface, from the counters (which also house three different cheap coffee makers, a small electric kettle, and a metal tree of chipped mugs) to a small breakfast table with two chairs. There’s a line of overgrown potted herbs on the windowsill. The most obvious giveaway that it’s a Newt’s is a large paper sign tacked to a Duck Taped-shut cupboard, which says (in Sharpie) _ NEWT’S MOLD EXPERIMENT: KEEP OUT. _

“It’s _ a _kitchen,” Hermann says, like Mother Newt is either a toddler or recently had his brain replaced with an exceptionally large rock. “There are infinite possible universes, Newton, infinite possible combinations of letters and numbers to try. Infinite. That could be any Newton Geiszler’s kitchen. It could be somebody else’s kitchen entirely. It—”

“Dude, shut up,” Mother Newt says. “I know my own kitchen.”

Before any of them can stop him, he pokes his head through the circle. “Hey, Hermann?” he calls. It echoes back at them. “Uh. I’m home?”

Hermann opens his mouth, presumably to continue lecturing Dr. Geiszler on the multiverse, or the laws of reality, or some boring shit like that, but he’s stopped short in his tracks when someone who sounds very, very much like him on the other side of the purple-rimmed circle calls back “_Newton_?”

“Or it could just be, like, twenty combinations,” Sexy Newt says, while Hermann stares, dumbfounded, as someone who_ looks _very, very much like him comes into view on the other side of the purple circle. “Who’s from another universe here, man?”

“I don’t,” Hermann stammers.

“Newton,” the other Hermann breathes, staggering back against one cluttered counter and knocking a book to the floor in the process. He looks like he’s on the verge of tears. “Newton, what—where have you _ been_? It’s been _ weeks_! I thought you’d—that you’d—”

“_Weeks_?” Mother Newt says. “Dude, it’s been three days. It hasn’t…”

He looks to Sexy Newt. (Their resident frequent flyer universe-hopper.) “Different dimension,” Sexy Newt says with a shrug. “You’re already from a possible future of this one. You can’t expect the timelines to match up perfectly. Happened to me once when I—”

“They said you disappeared into thin air in the middle of your laboratory,” the other Hermann says. (He’s older, like Mother Newt: greying temples, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes Newt might call _ laughter lines _if Hermann had a tendency to experience joy, glasses thicker, sweatervest even more worn and moth-eaten than before.) “That there was a great big flash of blue light—” Then he stops. He adjusts his glasses. He adjusts them again. He squints over Mother Newt’s shoulder, between Newt, to Dr. Geiszler (still bound up), to Siren Newt, to Sexy Newt, and finally to Hermann, where he lingers. “Er. What are—that is to say, how exactly are we speaking? Why are there five of you? Why is there…?”

“Oh,” Mother Newt says. “Right. Uh. Hermann, these are my alternate universe selves, and this is an alternate universe you.”

“Hello,” Hermann says, weakly.

“Hello,” the older Hermann echoes, also weakly.

“Basically, I got zapped into a parallel dimension,” Mother Newt says, “because—okay, I’m just going to explain this later, it’ll take too long.” He rounds on Sexy Newt. “How much time do I have before this closes?”

“Not sure,” Sexy Newt says with a shrug. “I wouldn’t test it.”

“Guess this is goodbye, then,” Mother Newt says, and claps him on the shoulder. “You’re a weird little dude, but _ thank you_, seriously. Good luck in outer space. Drop in whenever you want, since now I know you can. I’m sure Hermann would _ love _it.” Siren Newt is next—another friendly pat on the shoulder. “You were awesome, too. And weird. Behave yourself.”

Mother Newt pauses when he reaches Newt and Dr. Geiszler; Newt, to his surprise, finds his traitorous eyes beginning to tear up. He's going to miss Mother Newt more than he anticipated. “You’re sure I’ll be fine?” Dr. Geiszler says, in a very small voice.

Mother Newt presses a firm hand to his neck. He shuts his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them. “I’m sure,” he says. “You’ll need time to fully recover, obviously, but whatever’s left of the Precursor hivemind—whatever we didn’t overpower—should weaken and fade _ fast _once you’re no longer forced to plug yourself into the brain.” He turns a little stern—motherly, even. “Please burn that goddamn thing the second you get home.”

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Geiszler says darkly. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“And me?” Newt says. “I’m…?”

Before he can finish the question, Mother Newt draws him into a hug. His thick beard scratches Newt’s cheek. Newt sniffles. “As long as _ you _ don’t go plugging yourself into kaiju brains alone, either,” he says, “you’re _ also _gonna be fine.” He works something thin into Newt’s jeans pocket: Newt looks down to see one of Mother Newt’s small wallet photographs of the baby kaiju poking out from the denim. “Hermann, stick very, very close to him.”

“Wait,” Newt says, comprehension dawning a little belatedly. “Plugging myself in _ alone_?” The specification is curious; is Mother Newt implying he’d be fine if he did it along with _ someone else_? He supposes it’d even out the neural load, make it harder to burn himself out, easier to process the onslaught of new and quite literally alien information. Maybe, if they had a _ newer _brain sample, he and Hermann…

“Hey, dude,” Sexy Newt says.

The purple circle’s startled to ripple like the surface of a pond after someone’s chucked a stone into it. Mother Newt quickly drops Newt and pulls Hermann in for an even briefer hug, and, to Hermann’s obvious embarrassment, a little kiss on the cheek. He hurries over to the portal and sticks one leg through. The circle ripples again. “Best of luck, you guys,” he shouts. “It’s been a blast.”

He hops through. There’s just enough time before the circle fizzles into nonexistence for them all to witness Mother Newt stride across the kitchen and dip his Hermann into a _ very _deep kiss.

“Oh,” Hermann says. His cheeks are red. Newt looks to the ground quickly.

Sexy Newt is spinning the dial around again. “If we’re lucky,” he says, “we should—oh—”

It’s clear within seconds the next purple circle that fizzes to life is the wrong one: another Newt, this one in long vibrant robes with a decent-length beard to match, longer than Mother Newt’s, gapes back at them from the other side. “Holy shit,” he says. He looks at a small stick in his hand and shakes it; sparks fly out of the end. “Did _I_ do that?”

“Sorry,” Sexy Newt says. “Wrong universe. Have a nice day.”

The bearded Newt fizzes away.

“Was I wizard?” Newt says. “I’m pretty sure I was—”

Another purple circle. The Newt on the other end is standing in front of a large whiteboard, scrawling something in bright purple Expo marker and running his mouth off about some sort of jellyfish (his arms, Newt sees, are adorned with tattoos of fifty different sea creatures rather than kaiju), but he—and his apparent class—are significantly more alarmed than the wizard Newt when he spots them. He drops the marker; he staggers back against the whiteboard; twenty coeds turn around to goggle. “What the hell?” the Newt says.

Kaiju-free universe, Newt guesses. Looks like he’s still got plenty of style. Those tattoos are _ sick_, frankly, and they’re making Newt want another himself. “Sorry!” Sexy Newt repeats. “Wrong universe again!”

The next circle opens on a seashore that’d be almost picturesque, if it wasn’t for the jagged rocks, the steel-grey sky, the angry churn of the ocean. The gloomy castle silhouetted against the clouds atop more jagged rocks. Charming. “Oh!” Siren Newt gasps. “This is my beach! This is it!”

He hoists himself from his tub. Before he can so much as flop excitedly towards the circle, Hermann suddenly stiffens, exclaims “Wait!”, and clacks over to his desk in a rush to tear through the top drawer. “I’d nearly forgotten,” he says, “last night, after the rooftop—” He displays a small, tarnished piece of metal. It looks totally worthless. “Well. I’d promised you this.”

Totally worthless, and yet Siren Newt takes it from him almost reverently, eyes wide, mouth curling into an awed smile; then, to Newt and Hermann’s equal surprise, he plucks one scale from his long tail and offers it out to Hermann. “Here,” he says. “It’s good luck.”

“Ah,” Hermann says, “thank you.”

He takes it and slips it carefully into the pocket of his pajama bottoms. It seems to almost _ glow _through the cotton. Siren Newt smiles his sharp, jagged smile at him. “It was nice meeting you, Hermann.”

They’re met with a small spray of seawater as Siren Newt dives in to the portal and into the churning ocean. A dark shape swoops down above him, as if with wings made of the shadows themselves: a single pale hand presses to Siren Newt’s sharp-clawed one.

Then that reality flickers away, too.

Two left to go. Newt can pretty easily figure out who’s next. He stoops down to the couch to untie Dr. Geiszler’s wrists as more realities zip past, but Dr. Geiszler catches one of Newt’s own before Newt can pull away. “I just want to say,” Dr. Geiszler says, “that I’m sorry we didn’t meet under, uh, better circumstances.” He chews at his lower lip. “And I’m also sorry for drugging you. And for kicking you in the face. And for making you drift with me. And—”

“Hey, man,” Newt says, falsely cheery, because his nose _ does _ still hurt like a fucking bitch and he’s pretty sure it’s broken, and his head hasn’t stopped throbbing, “that wasn’t you, right?”

“Yeah,” Dr. Geiszler says. He drops Newt’s hand. “What am I even going to _ say _ when I get back? No one’s going to believe me.”

Which, yeah, is pretty true. Newt can’t imagine _ aliens made me do it _ standing up too well in a court, especially not taking into account the sort of wide-scale destruction Dr. Geiszler planned to wrought (regardless of whether or not the Breach re-opened successfully and the wroughting actually occurred). On the other hand—from the little snippets of the actual Newt Geiszler he saw in there—Newt imagines _ aliens made me do it _ is a little more believable than _ celebrated kaiju war hero snaps and engineers killer drones to jumpstart Apocalypse Round Two_. If there’s one thing he’s sure of— “Hermann will,” he shrugs. “There’s a start.”

“Dr. G?” Sexy Newt says. “I think this might be you.”

This reality is significantly starker than the others. There’s no Hermann waiting to greet Dr. Geiszler, for one thing, and Newt thinks that a creepy old castle might even be an improvement; they’re looking into a pristine and glinting chrome laboratory, empty except for expensive computer screens lining the walls, a single dusty paper coffee cup, and a handful of unfinished wire jumbles. Dr. Geiszler’s face darkens the second he peeks in. “Yeah,” he says, almost distastefully. “That’s—that’s it. That’s the lab.”

“It looks like everyone packed up shop while you were gone,” Newt says. Some of them mid-experiment, even. He wonders if it’s because time stretched strangely for Dr. Geiszler like it did for Mother Newt, or if it’s more because their head scientist a) disappeared into thin air after b) going, by all appearances, totally and utterly nuts. “Maybe you’re lucky and it’s all blown over.”

Dr. Geiszler makes a strange groaning noise. He’s getting antsier by the second, more visibly nervous, tugging on the drawstrings of the sweatshirt. “What if they’re not really gone?” he says. “What if the second I get back…?”

“Hey, listen,” Sexy Newt says. He reaches out and touches Dr. Geiszler’s shoulder. “I can go with you, if you want! At least until you feel stronger. I’ll keep an eye on you, help you smooth things out with Hermann—I could _ meet _your Herman, too.” He casts Hermann a small wink; Hermann equal parts preens and flusters. “Not that I’m tired of you, dude, don’t get the wrong idea.”

“Yeah,” Dr. Geiszler says. There’s a small bit of hope in his voice. “That’d be great, actually. Cool.”

“No sweat,” Sexy Newt says. “Gimme one second.”

He tosses his arms around Hermann and kisses him enthusiastically. “It was _ awesome _meeting you,” he says, batting his eyelashes, and before Newt has time to even be properly jealous or begin to seethe Sexy Newt draws him in for a hug and a kiss of his own. It’s—well, it’s very nice, actually, if not a little weird, and Newt can’t say it feels like kissing himself or anyone else he’s kissed before. It feels like a rush of static electricity. Like Newt’s sticking his lips to a ball of lightning. His mouth is tingling by the time it’s over; the the headache that’d been building in his temples all evening has suddenly vanished, and the dull throb of pain is gone from the bridge of his nose. “Both of you!” Sexy Newt finishes. He pats Newt’s cheek. “I’ll visit you some time, if that’s cool.”

“Ah,” Hermann says, red in the face.

“Guh,” Newt says, also red in the face.

“And Hermann—” Sexy Newt suddenly grows serious, “don’t forget what we talked about last night.”

Hermann nods automatically. The scrape on his forehead has miraculously disappeared, though Newt can't tell whether it's a result of the kiss or Siren Newt's scale.

Sexy Newt hops through the doorway first, with a flounce of his negligee, which he never bothered to change out of, then holds a hand out to Dr. Geiszler. For a moment, it looks like Dr. Geiszler’s going to bolt, to sprint past Newt and Hermann and out the lab doors, and then he looks like he’s going to be sick right where he stands, and then—with nothing but a small nod, and an earnest “Thank you,”—he takes Sexy Newt’s hand and follows him through.

The strange box disappears on the other side, this time, as Sexy Newt scoops it up with one final cheery wave. Newt and Hermann are left standing alone in their laboratory.

“Shit,” Newt sighs, after a long, awkward moment of silence. “I forgot to ask for my sweatshirt back.”

“You’re welcome to one of mine,” Hermann says, and then he kisses Newt, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note on potential plot hole w/ "Plugging myself in alone?" line, since im not sure how strong implication is: newt doesn't really retain most of what he sees in alt future newts' heads, bc of how overwhelming it is (between double hivemind w/ pru!newt, how out of it he is w/ mother newt, and how it's with 4 other people the third time around), so if he picked up on having drifted with hermann in a potential future timeline, he definitely doesn't remember it. consciously, anyway.


	6. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt reunites with Hermann, Newt reunites with Hermann, and Newt reunites with Hermann.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE TINY EPILOGUE AT LAST sorry this took me so long to upload, i genuinely completely forgot i like.....hadn't uploaded it yet, LMAO, and then i took some extra time to properly wrap up pru newt and pru hermann's story bc i felt bad for them. is it a littttttle bit of a dubiously ethical wrap-up? perhaps, but like, who cares
> 
> also i'm gonna be real, i barely remember pru, so let's pretend my description of what happened pre-newt being scooped up and dropped in a different dimension is totally right

To Newt’s surprise, or maybe to his lack of surprise, nothing really changed too much following Hermann’s spur-of-the-moment confession in the lab. They kissed; Hermann got all flustered and said “very good” or “splendid” or something dumb and proper like that (Newt was a little too overwhelmed to process it exactly, but it was definitely dumb and proper); they sat on the couch for a while, holding each other’s hands, staring into each other’s eyes, and blushing and ducking back in embarrassment every time one of them tried to speak. Finally they just kissed again.

That was that night. The next day, they were back at each other’s throats. Newt didn’t mind, for some reason—probably because the instant they _ weren’t _ at each other’s throats, they were kissing again. It'sa nice balance.

“How do you think they’re doing?” Newt says on the third night of their new relationship developments, sprawled out across the lab couch and Hermann’s lap. Hermann is reading over a document he typed up earlier; Newt is doing his best to distract him from that document. Earlier, he tried stealing his glasses. It didn’t work.

“How who’s doing?” Hermann says.

“You know,” Newt says. “_Me_.”

This is the first time he’s brought up the Newts since their departure the other night. It’s the first time he’s had the chance to, really; when he and Hermann haven’t been arguing or kissing, they’ve been catching up on work, filling out a million mandatory reports on the week’s events, and getting reprimanded for being MIA during the latest kaiju attack (_my evil clone tried to brainwash me _ isn’t a good enough excuse, apparently). Then there was the business of Newt’s unauthorized and unintentional drift with the kaiju brain—the Marshal wants more data and for Newt to have another go at it—and the business of making preparations for finding a _ new _ kaiju brain, and—basically, it’s a mess. No one even seems to give a shit that the other Newts have left (except maybe the LOCCENT tech who was sweet on Sexy Newt, and who walked conspicuously by the lab no less than four times before Newt finally broke the news to him). Most people didn’t notice they were even _ here _in the first place. “Oh,” Hermann says. “Of course.”

He pulls off his glasses and sets them down with his reading atop Newt’s chest. His fingers go to Newt’s hair. “I imagine they’re fine, really,” he says, slowly, a bit cautiously. Despite the recent evolution in their relationship, Newt has a feeling Hermann still feels a bit awkward about...well, basically everything that happened, from Mother Newt's marriage to the, uh, affectionate farewell they got from Sexy Newt. “I don’t think you ought to worry yourself with—”

“I’m not,” Newt cuts in, and it’s the truth. He’s not worried, not at all: it’s like he can feel it in the pit of his stomach, some weird, lingering joint-drift connection across dimensions. They’re all fine. Even Dr. Geiszler. He turns into Hermann’s touch with a happy hum. “Keep doing that. It feels nice.”

“Alright,” Hermann says, and gives Newt a tentative smile.

* * *

“Did they miss me?” Newt says, practically jogging down the hallway as Hermann clacks furiously to keep up. “I bet they missed me. Were they sad? Did they ask where I was?”

“How am _ I _supposed to know?” Hermann says. “They’re not exactly expert conversationalists, Newton. Mostly they just—ate and slept and made a mess of things as usual.”

“But you could’ve _ sensed _it,” Newt says. He wiggles his fingers against his temple.

Hermann makes a face and relents. “Oh, alright, fine. Yes, they missed you terribly. Almost as terribly as I did. I couldn’t get a moments’ peace they missed you so terribly. Are you happy?”

“Yes,” Newt says with a grin, and, flinging the door to the kaiju baby enclosure open, shouts, “Mommy’s home, kids!”

* * *

“It came from something called a jaeger,” Newt says. The five brand new bracelets from Hermann jingle around his wrist as he gestures excitedly. “The Other You made them. They’re giant monsters made of metal.”

“_Fascinating_,” Hermann says.

* * *

Hermann doesn’t drop dead of shock when Newt (urged on by the Other Newt giving him thumbs-up around the corner) knocks on his door with a little “Hey,” which is what Newt expects. He also doesn’t start shouting at Newt or threatening to call the PPDC or waving a kitchen knife in his face or anything like that, which is what Newt—frankly—feels he _ deserves_. Hermann opens the door. Hermann stares at him, long and hard, like he’s searching his face for something, like maybe he's already found it. Hermann opens the door a little wider.

“Well,” he says. “I certainly hope you’re ready to explain yourself.”

Hermann has deep shadows under his eyes, the same shade of purple-grey as the fading bruising around his neck. There’s a slump to his shoulders. He’s leaning more heavily on his cane than Newt remembers. “Uh,” Newt stammers.

“Aren’t you going to come in?” Hermann says.

He shows Newt into his tiny apartment, which is simultaneously the most Hermann and un-Hermann bachelor pad Newt’s ever seen. The wallpaper and furnishings are outdated, unstylish, purely Hermann, but the rest of it is much more reminiscent of the clutter Newt would leave all over his side of the lab. Most of the furniture is covered in stacks of books and paper. There’s a full ashtray on the coffee table. Small teapots and half-empty teacups are scattered haphazardly across every flat surface. Hermann clears aside two from the loveseat so they can sit down together, and even then, Newt pulls out a hidden molding orange peel from underneath a throw pillow. “Jesus, Hermann,” Newt blurts out before he can help it, “don’t you ever clean?”

Hermann flushes an angry, splotchy red, lips contorting into a scowl, and for a second, Newt wonders if he’s about to get a cup of room-temperature tea in the face. “I’ve been a little _ preoccupied _with clearing your bloody name lately,” he snaps. “Are you even remotely aware of the great big mess you’ve made of things, Newton?”

“No,” Newt says. His voice cracks, and he feels the _ stupid _ sting of tears in the corners of his eyes. He really, really, didn't want to cry. “I’m not.”

The exhausted slump returns to Hermann’s shoulders; his scowl vanishes. He reaches out and covers Newt’s hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Newt notices, for the first time, that his eyes are wet too. “Oh, Newton, I’m sorry. It’s just—I thought you were dead. Everyone did. I thought...”

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Uh, not dead. I am me again, though, so you don’t have to worry about...” He glances down to the bruising around Hermann’s neck before he can help himself. He coughs. “Yeah, I’m back. What kind of mess did I leave behind?”

It was a big one, Hermann explains. As Newt—or, really, the Precursors—hypothesized, Newt fucked _ something _ up in one of the zillions of lines of code he plugged into his drones to re-open the Breach, and barely five minutes after he initiated the protocol (thankfully for Hermann’s neck), there was some sort of electrical pulse that shot out from the computer. Shot out at _ Newt_. “You were there one moment,” Hermann says, “and the next—I was hitting the ground, and you were—I thought you’d been—scrambled to _ atoms_, or lost to the Anteverse, and I—”

Newt looks away while Hermann composes himself. “Ah,” Hermann finally says. “Thank you. I managed to shut down the system in time, which stopped the drones. That was weeks ago.”

“And what did you mean by clearing my name?” Newt says.

“Well—it hardly looked _ good _ for you, Newton,” Hermann says. “Drones _ you _ aided in the development of going on a murderous rampage? Powered by _ kaiju brains_? Our little—er—scuffle with Shao’s men in the elevator? And you’d vanished into thin air, it’s not as if I had any proof that you weren’t—you. No one would’ve believed me.”

“Hermann,” Newt says.

“And it wasn’t as if anyone had been _ killed_,” Hermann says, voice getting higher. “I stopped the drones before they could damage too much of the base—and Miss Mori was out of the hospital in a _ week_, at most—what I mean is that my conscience rests quite easy over it all.”

His _ conscience_? “What did you _ do_, Hermann?” Newt says.

Mere moments after Hermann saved the world for the second time (Hermann explains), Shao herself burst into the room, and Hermann—half reeling in shock, tears streaming down his face, and tugging his collar up over his purpling throat—thought of a lie fast. He and Newton had burst up here under the impression _ she’d _ been the one to set the drones off; _ Newton _ had been the one to shut them down, _ Newton _had been the one to re-seal the Breach; Newton disappeared the second he did so, taken, Hermann expected, along with the Breach. (It helped, Hermann says, to not have to feign his utter heartbreak as he told her that.) “I was,” Hermann says, “ah, grieving, after that, so no one thought to watch me too closely, which meant I could—well—”

“_Hermann_.”

“I broke into your flat, smashed that horrid brain to bits, burned every last shred of your research, and hacked _ multiple _databases to pin it all on the infiltration of Shao Industries by some nonexistent kaiju cultists who now currently reside at the top of the U.N.’s Most Wanted list,” Hermann says. “There. Are you quite happy?”

Newt gapes at him, unsure of what to even _say_. That’s—insane. Illegal. Basically _treason _against the whole fucking Earth. If anyone ever finds out, Hermann is toast, and all just to protect the good name of a guy who—for all Hermann knew—was worse than dead, who ignored him for a goddamn decade and made his day-to-day life a _nightmare _the decade before that, who straight-up tried to _murder_him. “You did that for me?” Newt squeaks. “But—why?”

“You know very well why,” Hermann sniffs. “Don’t be thick.”

Newt does—at least, he’s suspected, _ hoped_—but it doesn’t make it any less startling to hear Hermann acknowledge it aloud. Even in a roundabout way like that. A very large part of him wants to grab Hermann by the shoulders and kiss him senseless. A much smaller, much more rational part of Newt says _ too soon_, and Newt’s pleased to find—for the first time in a decade—it’s in a voice that’s entirely his own. He draws Hermann into an embrace instead. “I’m surprised you didn’t pin it on your dad,” he says into the crook of Hermann's neck.

Hermann pulls back and blinks at him; then, out of nowhere, lets out a short burst of laughter. “I won’t deny it crossed my mind,” he says, and Newt laughs, too. It feels nice to have a reason to. (He missed Hermann a lot.)

Hermann sobers up real fast, though. “Now where the _ hell _ were you?” he says, thumping Newt's back with his fist. “It was hard enough making something up the first time around—_this _ is going to be a bigger nightmare, I can tell you that much.”

“Long story,” Newt says. He wipes his eyes. “Uh, by the way—there’s someone you should meet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOYED IT!!! i think this is the single longest fic ive ever written
> 
> as usual find me over on tumblr at hermannsthumb (where i post ficlets and take prompts) and twitter at hermanngaylieb (where i do neither of those things)

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter at hermanngaylieb and tumblr at hermannsthumb (where i post ficlets and take prompts!)


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